Blue sky and Wonder, a Landscape without horizon
(2024)
author(s): Yasmin Kök
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Fine Arts
Summary:
Death, ritual, religion, my cultural heritage, I guess I am trying to make sense of it. We share some same questions. We are not sure about the answers we provide. Via condensed nodes, I try to unravel my ‘truth'. As I can predict, this piece of research will make me less sure about myself, and my beliefs. But that is okay. I know these issues will stay uncertain throughout my life. But the topics keep coming back to me daily. Being confronted with many possibilities, and freedom of choice, as far as I believe choices are free, I take a dive.
To see death, the dead, from up close, to see someone disappear, fascinates me and at the same time frightens me. It is a bundle of stories. My own and an analysis of stories of others. I research many aspects of death, around death, that goes hand in hand with us.
Our existence. My spirituality. My body and mind. I and other, mother, father sister, brother. A goalless search without hierarchy or linear approach.
Rewritable Creatures. Correspondence between Daniel Aschwanden, Vera Sebert and Lucie Strecker on Mimesis and Hybridity in Choreography
(2023)
author(s): Lucie Strecker, Vera Sebert
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Lucie Strecker (Angewandte Performance Laboratory and Department of Art and Communication Practices) reveals the artistic working process preceding a production with the contribution "Rewritable Creatures", reflecting on mimesis and hybridity in choreography through an exchange of letters with the late performer Daniel Aschwanden (Angewandte Performance Laboratory and Department of Art and Communication Practices) and the author Vera Sebert. As the three letter-writers search, speculate and ask each other questions, the text becomes a written performance, revealing an immediate, polyphonic approach to the subject that allows readers to become part of the performance. In this way, processes of hybridisation become manifest in writing. The performance, however, cannot be completed; Aschwanden’s sudden death interrupts the text, turning the contribution, in a sense, into a memorial to an artist, friend, and colleague and the readers into witnesses.
The Last Portrait: A microscopic view of transience, mourning and loss
(2017)
author(s): Lucy Willow
published in: Research Catalogue
In 2009, I began a photographic series of work titled Memento Mori (remember that you are mortal and will die) based on the melancholic symbolism of 17th Century Dutch Vanitas paintings. Appropriating the symbolic language found in these paintings, I was looking to draw attention to the parallel beauty found in both life and death. The images contained rotting fruit, decaying animals, bubbles, extinguished candles and jewellery to serve as a reminder of the transience of everything in life. The paintings held, within them, an understanding of a narrative from 17th Century culture, which warns against the vanities and temptations in life such as wealth, knowledge, lust and earthly pleasure. The narrative emphasises how we ought not to be distracted by these, but remain focussed on the spiritual, the afterlife. I borrowed the symbolism in order to examine mortality. In the reflection of a sad and moth-eaten taxidermied magpie I saw my own grief, resting between its tatty feathers as I photographed its stuffed corpse. I bought a lambs heart and placed it in the centre of a still life, to signify young loss, vulnerability and sadness. I hid any outward signs of mourning amongst a symbolic visual language that found its expression in the photograph. What else could I do? Working into the surface of the photograph with water, I was able to bleed and merge the colours, giving the surface a visceral, opulent quality that made the image feel as though it was disappearing and rotting in the presence of the viewer. The colour was an externalization of what was happening, on the inside: the feeling of dissolving. I was looking to understand death through the arrangements of objects I assembled and photographed. An event, once photographed, becomes more real. I photographed death, drawing it close, feeling its omnipresence intimately in the midst of life. A photograph confirms reality. The scythe of death cuts through all the unnecessary in life, bringing us to stillness at the core of our being, where nothing else exists but a silent longing for the peace it brings.
Finding the time and place to say goodbye
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Madelief van de Beek
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
By researching crematoria and graveyards I try to break the taboo surrounding grief and death. What are the elements of design at these places that could provide comfort? What are the stereotypes about death culture that prevents us from fully accepting what happens to us when we die?
Den emotionellt hållbara filmprocessen
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Emilie Löfgren
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Hur skapar och utvecklar jag metoder för en filmprocess som värnar mitt eget och mina medarbetares mentala och känslomässiga välbefinnande när vi gör film om svåra frågor? Hur tar jag hand om mina medverkande? Hur ser min film ut som är sprungen ur en sådan arbetsprocess? Hur har arbetet med terapeuten Cilla Holm, tidigare filmproducent, bidragit till en hållbar filmprocess? Filmbranschen präglas av högt tempo och utmattningssyndrom är inte ovanligt. För fyra år sedan blev jag utmattad och efter att ha sörjt mitt gamla jag och min nya stresskänslighet kom jag fram till att jag inte tänker acceptera att jag inte ska kunna arbeta med det jag älskar, film och skrivande. Jag tänkte att det måste finnas andra sätt att arbeta med film och fortfarande få må bra.
En exposition om skapandet av min dokumentärfilm Om sorg (2022) och metoden som jag kallar för den emotionellt hållbara filmprocessen.
English abstract:
How do I create healthy working methods that benefit my own and my team members mental and emotional wellbeing while making film about difficult subjects? What does a documentary sprung out of these methods look like? How has the collaboration with Cilla Holm, film therapist and former film producer, contributed to make the process emotionally sustainable? The film industry is fast paced and burnout is not uncommon. Four years ago it happened to me and I had a total identity crisis. After grieving my old self, my ability to multi-task and my newfound stress intolerance, I came to the conclusion that I will not accept that I have to leave the film industry. I wanted to keep working, I just had to find another way to do it.
An exposition about the creation of my documentary About Grief (2022) and the method that I call The emotionally sustainable film process.