Death is taboo in modern societies; "la mort est pornographique"
said the French philosopher J. Baudrillard. Tidied away, hidden by
reason and by progress, which tend to overwhelm all human
limits, and by a life pointed towards transience, spectacle, and
substitutability. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman spoke of
mortality as "reversible death", "temporary disappearance".
I started to force myself to become familiar with this, in fact
natural but culturally prohibited, thing. By inserting "dead"
elements into everyday actions and scenes, to reinforce the idea of
familiarity, to force an awareness of mortality in real life. The
mutilated, decomposed remains retain traces of their lives, as
archaeological ruins do, and, with the typical ambivalence of ruins,
are also witnesses of the end, of their final loss. A daily life
composed of both life and death.
