TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

‘I am a living being.
I am already dying.
I am a dying being.’

I formulated this statement in 2020 to mark the inception of an artistic series investigating death from an ecological perspective.

The series builds upon my practice around leaky and vulnerable bodies and ecologies featuring the direct manipulation of living processes with (bio)technology. The series thus develops my practice’s core by addressing how, in the Global North, death is a lingering taboo with tangled ethical implications. These implications can be seen e.g. in how the biomedical extension of life is praised as an indisputable value, whereas the deadly exploitation of those considered ‘less worth’ (because of gender, species, etc) is legitimized. The taboo rests on a binary assigning a positive value to life and a negative to death – but depending on whose life or death.

Following these reflections, questions arise from the 2020 statement, such as: what kind(s) of death(s) am I dying? What does it mean to be a dying being in times of technoscience and eco-disruption? The series addresses such questions though performance, manipulation of biological processes, ecological observation, and philosophical inquiry.

Philosophically, concepts from queer death studies and environmental humanities help critically examine how death’s processuality unfolds through ecology and biotech. Artistically, different projects radically engage with macro and micro ecologies. Lament looks at post-wildfire ecologies in soil and features an installation-performance and community engagement. An ongoing project on my auto-immune condition interrogates the conflictual relation between immune and skin cells.

Ultimately, the series asks: by embracing death as a vulnerable, generative agent, what novel ways of inhabiting the world may emerge? My talk will discuss the series’ current development and underpinning questions with a situated approach, to prompt a discussion on how death may catalyse ideas, ethics and aesthetics.