APPROACHING DEATH: transforming our conversations around fear of dying
The artistic practice-based PhD project APPROACHING DEATH: transforming our conversations around fear of dying will develop an integrated and active language for discussing fear of death. This will happen through the production of a mixed mediainstallation, workshops, a podcast, a leaflet and a website. A fundamental ambition of this PhD project is to create a space, within both physical and virtual realms, to allow people to approach death and engage with their related fears from new perspectives.
As a visual artist I question the role and effect images have on our perceptions and emotions when discussing death. Here I see a necessity of studying new possible forms of communication around dying. With this PhD project I therefore wish to question which images can be used for examining death without making it fearful, but at the same time not making it remote. I furthermore wish to question which images can come close to the actual experience of dying. Within this PhD project it is specifically the connection to the moving image and sound that I wish to study. It is my intention to utilise the moving image as a medium to explore the connection between the human engagement with our own mortality and our phenomenological and temporal experience of a video installation.
The PhD project is predominantly empirically oriented, and the research will therefore enfold through interviews and field recordings in hospices and in private homes with dying people. These studies will investigate the fear of what will happen in the moment of dying, and the fear of what will happen after the moment of dying. Throughout this process I plan to collect an extensive record of interviews, data, images and audio. These will be used as the material from which I will create an artistic installation containing moving image and sound. Here I will explore if the aesthetic and physical experience of the installation can have a transformative effect on a viewer, through which they are lead towards discussing death in a less fearful way, and with a more active language.
My goal is that the installation will be exhibited within a hospital or hospice environment. The process will also be documented and gathered online in a website. Operating in this digital state, I hope to expand the potential audience of the work so that it can be accessed as a resource for individuals and/or friends and relatives who are dealing with terminal diagnoses.
Fear of death is a widely researched and extremely broad subject matter. I believe that as an artistic researcher there is a potential to approach the subject matter with an subjective-essayistic practice informed by critical thought on representation that will contribute to the fields of other disciplines.
While the approach of this project is primarily an artistic one, it also aspires to work within the often conflicting fields of medical/scientific and the religious/spiritual in conversations around death, aiming to examine disagreements and contradictions in their respective understanding of the process of dying, and ultimately look to highlight overlaps and connections in their operations. Along this, through my working practice and methodologies, the project will have strong connections to Antropological and Sociological departments, while also contributing to the contemporary discourse around video art installations.