Installation/Film/Performance

 

The first breath of life, puts us on the long winding road to death. A babies heart beat marking the first mile stone along it. Already on the way back from hospital, the crying fetus rapped in the arms of its mother, its life starts fading into nothingness.

  

Life in itself is melancholy. Even on the best of days, the tormenting horror of death, is one’s shadow. No matter how fast we try to run from it, how deeply we try to ignore its burden, it’s always lurking over us. This becomes clearer and clearer in the twilight of one’s life. Death is the uneditable end. The one thing we have no power over.

 

This thought alone, wants us to be remembered, the thought of our existence, drifting into oblivion, the creature of our nightmares. In order to prevent this, people try to leave as many traces of their passing as possible. Igniting the hope, that we will be immortalized in the memories of others.

 

I combined my countless experiences of living in foreign countries with the matches I collected in various places, displayed them on a stand in the outer ring of the venue, and invited the audience to dress up in the robes I had prepared according to the live video guide. The Audience was then beckoned to stroll through the middle of the venue with the sound of the mantle being struck.

 

A match is selected, lit, and finally extinguished before being thrown into the pile of ashes that I “plowed”. The project attempts to bring the participants into the work with a religious-like behavioral ritual, which enables the viewers to feel the fear of life rooted in human nature. Furthermore it lets the audience face their own burning time and life through behavior in addition to feeling every second that burns away, and eventually form an exchange of life with each other. The work uses the disappearing dust as the soil for new life, and the performers as tools such as media to promote the new life, trying to create a cycle of exhaustion and rebirth, whilst transferring the subtle changes to the audience in order to give them the opportunity to pay tribute to each other’s loss of life together.