Italian artist Vincenzo Aiello is celebrating the foreskin—and protesting male circumcision with the aid of a Kickstarter campaign.
His project, titled “HUFO: The Missing Piece” (shorthand for “HUman FOreskin”) is dedicated to raising awareness about circumcision and the negative impact that circumcision can have on a man’s emotional health and sex life.
Aiello creates hyperrealistic foreskin sculptures using silicon resin and is selling them, displayed in frames inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, for $1,000 a pop as part of an “intactivist” Kickstarter campaign. This campaign could be the perfect bookend for the successful campaign to build a massive vagina sculpture in Texas (see Help Kickstarter Artist Build Six-Foot Vagina For Texas Women).
Smaller pledges will earn you a print or T-shirt showing the piece, which Aiello created after carefully studying circumcision surgeries to determine how the foreskin, dubbed “America’s censored body part,” is removed. For $10,000, the artist will build one of his signature mosaics in which the sculpture will be displayed.
The HUFO projects questions whether it’s “ethical for parents to remove functional tissue from their children’s bodies to conform to social or cultural norms,” and compares the American propensity for male circumcision to widely decried African traditions of female circumcision. Aiello claims that the foreskin is important erogenous tissue, and that the surgery to remove it is painful and potentially traumatizing to infants.
“Circumcision has become so commonplace in the US that parents often forget that circumcision is a surgery,” Aiello states on the Kickstarter page. “Every other surgery in Western medicine requires both compelling and urgent medical reasons to perform without consent.”
Aiello, who was circumcised as an adult for undisclosed medical reasons, has also founded a research company called Foregen, dedicated to developing medical techniques that will successfully regenerate the foreskin.
With 42 days remaining, HUFO has already raised nearly $13,000 towards its $40,000 goal.
A comparison of a so-called average adult male foreskin and the iPhone 5s.
Via Kickstarter.com