Thanatology - Death Studies

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

The felt sense of whoness is not a me-ness…me is self-fixation and in fact the sense of whoness can free us from objectified self-fixation. The sense of me often replaces the sense of who. When the experiential nonconceptual felt sense of who is not known or experienced, the felt sense of me-ness arises desperately. The sense of who is unfixatedness and this innate sense of no-thingness can be found and even experienced as ongoing timeless awareness in time. Innermost awareness in its manifestation can be experienced as whoness, no-thingness and open knowingness. The sense of me-ness is self-fixated, self-referencing and this me-ness can obscure the experiential arising of whoness. The sense of me-ness reflects the being in mind alone, and the sense of whoness reflects being deeply within the awareness field. Whoness manifests most directly as pause and within the pause. The pause is unbound in betweeness…the space in between..transitional spaciousness. When the spaciousness of the breathless breath opens whoness can be felt as uncontained and unbound. Whoness is experiential openness….openess without a name or prior to name. We may say openness prior to mind. Dasein to use Heideggarian language. When the breathless breath manifests the experience is always mysterious. What does breathless breath mean? Breathless means no breath, there is no breath. The word breath here, in this context signifies that there is no breath but there is respiration. There is this inner most experience of no breath, no inhaling or exhaling of air and yet there is respiration. There is a respiration without breath and beyond breath. For instance, in the Kechari mudra this breathless breath experience takes place. The breath stops and yet there is an inner sense of breathless respiration. This experience of respiration without breath is described in various traditions of eastern philosophy. In the Dzogchen tradition Longchenpa describes the experience in his great text Words and Meaning. This

Informal communities of Russian artists and intellectuals during the late Soviet years practiced a “politics of indistinction.” They claimed to be uninterested in anything political and differentiated themselves from ordinary “Soviet citizens,” whether supporters of or dissenters from the system. However, their apolitical lifestyles and pursuits contributed greatly to creating the conditions for making the collapse of the Soviet state imminent. Close examination of one such group, the Necrorealists, raises a set of questions that are central for an understanding of momentous and unexpected social transformations, and of the concept of "politics" more broadly

This is the sixth chapter of Freud, Psychoanalysis and Death (Cambridge University Press, 2013). I this chapter I try to elucidate some of the complexities and problematics of Freud’s thinking about death, by dealing with his most important text on the subject, a paper written in 1915 called “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.”
While on the whole, as I argue in previous chapters, Freud’s writings show little theoretical interest in the issue of death or are reductionistic, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” is often taken to express a different position, a more “existential” concern with death.  Through a close reading of this text, we see however how self-contradictory it is, with reductionist and existentialist views of death locked in a struggle.
Freud’s text contains, I show, two different attitudes toward death, each one seeking expression: one that finds in death a meaningful and important coordinate for human life, and another that disregards the importance of death per se in our mental life. The two attitudes come into constant confrontation and which incessantly undermine both each other’s claims and the logic of the article as a whole.

Humanity is on the threshold of recognizing the fundamental error in its view of life and death. Both death as well as active life is necessary to the vital formation of a larger, more essential whole. In this paper, I apply the sociology of knowledge and change as it pertains to death and focus on ways in which we can step outside its traditional frameworks and limitations. I also discuss topics related to death such as birth, aging, sickness, and war, and examine cultural differences in attitudes toward death. I offer varying perspectives including the Buddhist view and from these draw implications and conclusions. I apply the lenses of contemporary social scientists such as Edgar Morin, Kenneth Gergen, Edward Stewart, Milton Bennett, Mary Catherine Bateson, E. Doyle McCarthy, Philip Slater, and Piotr Sztompka. To these I add other relevant passages from the writings and speeches of key thinkers on the topic of death, in particular, Buddhist philosopher, peacebuilder, and educator, Daisaku Ikeda. To construct a more humanistic and sustainable view of life, it is first of all crucial to establish a culture which perceives death in its larger living context as but one cycle in the expansive eternity of life.

In this meditation, Anya Bernstein and Alexei Yurchak discuss Yurchak's essay, " The canon and the mushroom: Lenin, sacredness, and Soviet collapse, " which is published in the current issue. They elaborate on some points in the essay that are central for the understanding of the figure of " Lenin " and its role in Soviet history, take them in new directions, and link them to other topics that are relevant to anthropology. The themes discussed include sacredness and blasphemy; death, resurrection, and immortality; language, intentionality, and responsibility; voice, ventriloquism, and truth; and more.

First I would like to describe a dream I had a few years ago. I am sitting in the meditation center and I hear and see Swami Muktananda speaking to someone behind a screen. The sound is of two old men speaking about death. The voice of the other old person behind the screen sounded so familiar but I could not place the voice in those moments. Swami Muktananda is saying that in the mind and through the mind alone death is impossible; the abyss can not be crossed by mind alone. Then the other voice behind the screen describes how thin the veil is between this earth realm and the realm beyond death…the deathless realm. And both are laughing about how close, how unimaginably close, the two dimensions are. When I woke up I naturally was happy to have such dream. Later in the morning I began seeing clients. Around noon I received a phone call telling me that Lama Kungsang Dechin Lingpa had died during the night. It was his voice that was behind the screen.

This paper presents the major findings of the first anthropological study of British and American mummymania, the public fascination with ancient Egyptian mummies, and its associated myth, the mummy’s curse: a belief that those who interfere with Egyptian tombs will be punished. The study incorporates museum based field research, textual sources, film analysis and material culture studies. Originally lay critiques of archaeological ethics, curses were appropriated by the mass media, which reduced public sympathy for them by associating them with evil living mummy characters. Fictional mummies’ abject traits later came to symbolise old age, decay, pollution, death and difference – negative concepts with which museum visitors now associate real mummies. Museum displays inadvertently remind visitors of stereotypes and museums may exploit stereotypes for profit or employ staff who elaborate curse myths. In my view, museums could do more to counter stereotyping by addressing visitors’ predisposition to regard mummies with abhorrence and derision.

How adolescents use the social networking site Facebook to express grief is a growing area of research. In reviewing current literature, it is evident that many questions still remain unanswered. Additionally, this ever-evolving platform for grief, mourning and bereavement may hold many implications for educators, policy developers and school counsellors and how they manage and support adolescents dealing with the sudden death of a peer. This article explores the reasons why Facebook memorials may appeal to a grieving adolescent, conventions in online grief, and challenges for schools in the context of policies for social networking.

Controversy about museums’ possession and exhibition of human remains has usually affected those identified as ancestral remains by indigenous peoples. Egyptian mummies, with their long tradition of exhibition, seemed exempt from such considerations until the covering of unwrapped remains in the Egyptian gallery at The Manchester Museum in 2008. The museum’s representatives argued that this covering responded to visitors’ objections, but subsequent widespread protest against the measure suggested that it had been carried out with inadequate public consultation. With reference to the Manchester case, I will present two arguments to expand the scope of current debates about human remains display. The first argument favours the consideration of museum visitors from cultures other than those represented by exhibited remains as legitimate stakeholders in the remains’ management, including consideration of their personal reasons and historical precedents for favouring display. The second argument, which reveals the spurious bases of many objections to Egyptian mummies’ display and demonstrates their derivation from misconceptions promulgated by the media, shows that the grounds for public objections to human remains display should be more critically examined. If perpetuated rather than halted, the display of mummies could be used to actively combat disparaging media stereotypes. Human remains exhibition is not inherently offensive, but can be regarded as such by visitors whose cultural backgrounds fail to prepare them for encounters with the dead. Removing the dead from display avoids engagement with ethics debates rather than facing the challenge of finding ways to respect the dead by facilitating encounters with them.

In June 2016, the Canadian government passed Bill C-14 on medical assistance in dying, allowing for medically assisted suicide when ‘death has become reasonably foreseeable.’ While available for ill or physically disabled people at the end-of-life, medically assisted suicide is denied in cases where people are perceived to have a mental disability and whose suffering is strictly emotional/psychological, like suicidal people. I argue that this results in constructing two classes of suicidal subjects by considering physically disabled or ill people as legitimate subjects who should receive assistance in dying and suicidal people as illegitimate subjects who must be kept alive through what I call the ‘injunction to live’ and ‘somatechnologies of life’. Analysing discourses on suicide targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans* and queer (LGBTQ) people in LGBTQ scholarship, I argue that, based on the silencing of suicidal subjects through the injunction to live, suicidal people constitute an oppressed group whose claims remain unintelligible within society, law, medical/psychiatric systems and LGBTQ scholarship. This essay calls for listening to suicidal people’s voices and developing an accountable response to their suffering and claims.

Keywords: Suicide; Medically assisted suicide; LGBTQ scholarship; Ableism/Sanism; Injunction to live; Stigmatisation


Baril, Alexandre (2017). “The Somatechnologies of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Law: LGBTQ Discourses on Suicide and the Injunction to Live,” Special Issue: Sexuality in Canada, Somatechnics, 7 (2): 201-217.

This study explores the meaning of the death of a companion animal through autoethnographic poetry in conjunction with narrative reflections. This method expands the depth and scope of poetry in qualitative research by transforming expressive works into both the subject and product of inquiry.

This paper reviews the evidence for Neolithic burial practices in SE Arabia, focusing in particular on sites in the Ja'alan region of eastern Oman. Attention is given to the nature of material buried with human remains, including jewellery and, most interestingly, the bones and shells of green turtles in the burials of Ra's al-Hamra 5 and 10. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible evidence for "necrophobia" at the 5 th millennium BC Neolithic necropolis of Suwayh 1.

RESUMEN:
Las investigaciones aquí desarrolladas buscan una aproximación interdisciplinaria al fenómeno de la salud y la enfermedad, así como a la naturaleza de la práctica médica en la posmodernidad. La filosofía de la medicina se inspira fundamentalmente en la actual filosofía de la ciencia, que ha abandonado la idea de una realidad objetiva o de un orden natural inmutable, reemplazándola por la representación de nuestro conocimiento, adquiriendo así uno de sus rasgos fundamentales, el carácter holístico e interpretativo. Más allá de esto –en una aproximación bioética– se busca considerar el cuerpo de las personas con enfermedades avanzadas, y con riesgo cercano de muerte, donde la presencia inminente de mutilaciones o terapias altamente invasivas, con el correspondiente decaimiento y destrucción del propio cuerpo, nos fuerzan a pensar más allá de la “dignidad”, en “la zona muda”, para enfrentarse en el tema irreductible del dolor.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

RESUMEN:
En la amplia biografía de Ernest Jones sobre la vida y la obra de Freud, el autor menciona en varios párrafos las ideas de Nietzsche, algunos aforismos, e incluso señala influencias (aun en contra de la opinión del propio Freud). Es de marcar también la estrecha relación de Freud con Lou Andreas Salomé, que había sido amiga y admiradora de Nietzsche, y que además escribió una biografía del filósofo. Las Actas permitirán al lector seguir la evolución que transformó al grupo de asistentes a las “reuniones de los miércoles”; un conjunto heterogéneo de intelectuales de distintas disciplinas que se reunían semanalmente en casa de Freud- en una sociedad de psicoanalistas.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca

RESUMEN:
Se fundamenta la tesis de Sloterdijk según la cual el ser humano es el animal que ha de esperar y sobrevivir a las separaciones de sus próximos, se muestra luego como el verdadero trabajo del duelo, considerado desde el punto de vista psicohistórico, no significa en principio otra cosa que el esfuerzo de los supervivientes por colocar a sus muertos en un círculo de proximidad soportable. Para finalmente dar cuenta como la muerte no es sólo un poderoso estresor metafísico, sino a su vez, el estímulo propiamente creador de cultura y tradición, de donde se sigue que las culturas son funciones de las criptas sobre las que se asientan las generaciones de turno.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca
VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo,  "Peter Sloterdijk: Espacio tanatológico, duelo esférico y disposición melancólica", En NÓMADAS, Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales y Jurídicas - Universidad Complutense de Madrid, | Nº 17 | Enero-Junio 2008 -1º / 1 | pp. 151-158
http://www.ucm.es/info/nomadas/17/avrocca_sloterdijk2.pdf

The forensic facial reconstruction techniques first applied to Egyptian mummies in the 1970s have recently been enhanced by computer technology. Now almost every scientific study of an Egyptian mummy culminates in the recreation of his or her living face, a practice that reveals a preference by scientists and the public to engage emotionally and personally with the people of the past. Yet how can this humanisation of ancient Egyptians provide any specific insights into their lives and personalities, when examination of their bodies usually reveals only medical information? Given the precedent of physiognomy – the interpretation of facial features as indications of character and life experience – might reconstructed mummy faces serve only to invite subjective speculations by members of the public about the private lives of ancient Egyptians? The history of mummymania, from Victorian unwrappings and poetry to twentieth century cigarette cards and fiction, exhibits the influence of early Egyptologists’ physiognomic readings of the faces of pharaohs, replete with connotations of race, class and religion. This use of facial morphology to concoct biographies of Egyptians for the purpose of asserting Western values may set a precedent for contemporary popular interpretations of mummies, long after the dismissal of physiognomy as a pseudoscience. In that case, at what cost might mummy facial reconstruction endeavour to establish empathy for its subjects? Is the presumption that they were “just like us” – a denial of cultural difference, an appropriation of the past by the present – the only way in which we can feel close to them?

The aim of this study was to explore cultural factors affecting burial rituals in Poland. Thirty-four university students collected data from their relatives and created written narratives about deaths in their families or community. Ten additional interviews were conducted with community members, a priest, and medical personnel as part of theoretical sampling and verifi cation of emerging theories. The qualitative material was administered with NVivo and analysed using the Grounded Theory techniques to produce a complex description of folk beliefs, superstitions, as well as symbolic and psychological meaning ascribed to traditional customs. Some of the practices were found susceptible to extinction due to industrialisation, globalisation, and cultural development.

In contemporary popular culture, Egyptian mummies tend to be portrayed as villains or clowns. This has developed from Hollywood's presentation of these characters as dragon-like figures - evil and wasteful hoarders of maidens and treasure. In contrast, nineteenth century poems, romance fiction and even non-fiction travelogues interpreted mummies as romantic female figures all too willing to yield their treasures to male unwrappers. Elaborating upon my earlier discussion of fictional mummies (Day 2006), I will show that a European folkloric archetype that Joseph Campbell called the 'Dragon Principle' was first applied to both real and fictional mummies long before Hollywood's horror classics, albeit differently: the Victorian mummy was not a waster of treasure, but a wasted treasure herself, awaiting (symbolic sexual) liberation by an archaeologist. She was not a dragon, but the prisoner of a dragon - hidden in a tomb, neglected by a collector (Lynch, "The Lady Isis in Bohemia") or denied marriage to the hero of a narrative by her jealous father, the pharaoh (as in Gautier's "The Mummy's Foot" and Haggard's "Smith and the Pharaohs"). Ultimately, time is the dragon imprisoning the mummy; a contradictory figure who is ages old yet perpetually youthful, she cannot abide forever with her lover from the modern world, and disappears like a ghost or crumbles into dust. In contrast to cursed mummies who carried deadly flower seeds to avenge the figurative rape of themselves and their tombs by intruders (Alcott's "Lost in a Pyramid, or The Mummy's Curse"), imprisoned mummies advertised their scientific, aesthetic and implied sexual availability with an inviting array of flowers that alluded to virginity ("The Lady Isis in Bohemia"). Unlike male mummies (Smith's poem "Address to the Mummy at Belzoni's Exhibition"), they even obligingly responded to interrogations about their past lives (Copland's 1834 poems "The Mummy Awaked" and "The Mummy's Reply", analysed here for the first time). The method by which cinema abjected mummies and privileged "the mummy's curse" over romance as the predominant mummy genre of the twentieth century can now be understood in terms of Hollywood's reattribution (not unprecedented application) of the dragon role in mummy lore: its conversion of mummies from damsels in distress into damsel-destroying monsters.

The recent digitisation of nineteenth century periodicals has revealed that that many more creative literary works featuring Egyptian mummies were written than were previously known to scholars or the public. Anthologies of mummy fiction published to date are considerably incomplete and it will now be possible to anthologise mummy poetry and plays. With much more source material for study, scholars can begin to build a more comprehensive account of the evolution and social functions of fictional mummies in Britain and the United States. A chronological study of mummy poetry demonstrates the abiding influence of Horace Smith’s seminal Address to the Mummy (1821) upon later poems and shows that poets gendered mummies as female in order to submit mummies to metaphorical interrogation. This use of a patriarchal vision of gender relations as a means to symbolise colonial and economic domination of Egypt was mirrored in mummy romance fiction, in which male explorers conquered female mummies – but recently discovered mummy curse fiction, authored by American women in the 1860s, reversed this motif: men who defiled female mummies were slaughtered by ancient magic. Digitised fiction reveals the proto-feminist origins of the “mummy’s curse” and demonstrates that Conan Doyle’s Lot Nº. 249 (1892), upon which Hollywood’s mummy films were apparently based, was derived from a genre already long established. New theoretical studies of mummymania made possible by the digitisation of Victorian source material will establish mummymania as a core subject within the History of Egyptology, an emerging subdiscipline of Egyptology.

This article, originally published years ago in the Laughing Man, a journal of contemporary spirituality, examines accounts of the extraordinary manners of death attributed to mystics, saints and sages of numerous spiritual traditions, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism.

Taking the cue from some reflections by Walter Benjamin and Eugene Minkowski, the present paper wants to analyze the relationship between death and narration in the age of digital culture. In fact, the so-called “Digital Death” revolutionizes our bond with death, with the traditional thought of immortality and with the Geisterwelt. Once the author has defined the “Digital Death”, this paper firstly describes some current forms of digital communication (Eterni.me, Eter9) that try to get rid of death, impoverishing narrations and handed-down knowledge. Secondly, it describes other forms (Facebook and social networks in general) that, on the contrary, offer new resources through which we can enrich our memory of the dead, thus reinvigorating the role of death as an authority from which all narrated stories stem.

Keywords: Digital Death, Immortality, Narration, Social Network, End-Life

The present paper analyzes, first of all, some of the most common practical strategies used nowadays against the process of aging (starting from Aubrey de Grey’s studies); it then proceeds to bring to light other scientific and technological theories that, aiming at overcoming the human with the posthuman in the near future, try to find the elixir of eternal life and youth. Our final aim is to give to the reader a fairly complete overview of the relationship between human enhancement and end of life in the area both of scientific and humanistic research.

Bu çalışmamızda, ölüm hakkında yapılan araştırmaların bir bölümünün verileri ışığında ölümsüzlük arzusu ve ölüme ilişkin olarak, maskeleme, bastırma, korku, kaygı, meydan okuma, kabullenme, ölümü isteme,... gibi tutumlar hakkında bilgi vermeye çalışacağız.

Ce texte est organisé en deux parties. La première partie remet en perspective historique la rencontre manquée entre les travaux portant sur le changement social africain, dans lesquels va s’inscrire Balandier à partir des années 1950, et la dynamique historique des funérailles africaines de la même période. La seconde partie revient sur l’actualité de l’héritage de Balandier pour penser les dynamiques contemporaines des funérailles africaines, lesquelles sont considérées ici comme des points d’entrée féconds à partir desquels il est possible d’explorer avec profit des dynamiques plus générales du champ social.

In 1998, the late Dominic Montserrat rediscovered the 1869 story "Lost in a Pyramid: or, the Mummy’s Curse" by Louisa May Alcott, which he claimed to be the earliest fiction story with a “mummy’s curse” theme. I have since discovered a number of even earlier works in this genre that confirm Montserrat’s speculation that women made a vital contribution to early Western popular curse lore. Using examples from these forgotten works, I will show that American female authors drew an analogy between the unwrapping of mummies and rape, not only to condemn unwrapping as distasteful, but also perhaps to critique capitalism and patriarchy, which objectified and commodified the bodies of living women and mummies alike. In so doing they Westernised Arabic curse legends by investing them with proto-feminist meanings relevant to their own culture, establishing an analogy that survives, if implicitly, in even the most abstracted contemporary curse scenarios.

Thomas Rowlandson's 'English Dance of Death' is quite rightly famous. However, not many people know the derivative, slightly later edition entitled 'The British Dance of Death', based on drawings by Benedictus Antonio Van Assen (born c.1767 – died c.1817). This later work was published in two editions between 1822 and 1823, i.e. after the artist's death. The text by an anonymous author is in prose (compared to William Coombe's verse text for Rowlandson's 'Dance'). The comparison throws in relief the values in Rowlandson's 'Dance' compared to the later interpretation.

In the Insanity Defence Woody Allen claims that when we say humans are mortal we are obviously not complimenting them. It is difficult to contradict great comedy, of course, but if what I argue holds, Allen is wrong on this account. Mortality is a complimentor at least something for which we should be gratefulsince life without it threatens with disaster. To live without death also means living in the universe in its more hostile stages under conditions where there can be no meaningful life. In this way, immortality is worse than death. In addition, I argue that no matter how carefully we qualify the conditions that make up immortality the old problem of death resurface. I therefore conclude, with a nod towards Voltaire, that if death did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it. ARTICLE HISTORY Downloaded by [UiT Norges arktiske universitet] at 23:43 17 December 2017 2 H. A. HOLMEN Downloaded by [UiT Norges arktiske universitet]

This article explores the socialisation of the experience of grief in Southern Benin. Drawing on field research conducted in Southern Benin since the beginning of the 2000s and mobilising interviews and participant observations with bereaved people, I argue that grief is profoundly shaped by interiorised dispositions to think, act and feel, as well as social experiences (from family relationships to religious practices and economic conditions, among other things). The article mainly exemplifies this contention with two ethnographic vignettes, which respectively emphasise the significant place that funerals take locally in the grieving experience, and approach the issue of the socialisation of infant deaths.

This article examines how both religious and secular regimes of meaning seek to transcend, or overcome, death. I argue against the claim that religion provides a superior method for quelling our mortal dread (thus leaving secular people with no option but to return to religious regimes of meaning, when coping with death). Instead I argue that both religion and the secular have failed to take our mortality seriously, often collapsing misogyny and mortal dread together in a double rejection of both our dying bodies and death itself. In other words; they both do violence to death, and this violence often has gendered dimensions. I examine feminist attempts to "transfigure mortality" that work both with and against religious and secular thought and I ultimately query whether these transfigurations might be deemed "postsecular."

Aristocratic and civic burial rituals and memoria of the dead in the Late Middle Ages as reflected in diplomatic sources – the charters of the Lower Austrian provincial archives as a case study

This paper deals with the evidence of burial rituals and
memoria of the dead in the late Middle Ages found in
charters from the Lower Austrian provincial archives. The
majority of the charters selected as examples are testaments
from aristocrats or burghers. These records demonstrate
that sepulchral ceremonial was very standardised among
the nobility and that testaments only rarely include provisions
providing details about the exequies. However, when
this is the case the requirements are very intriguing, involving
for instance the request for the symbolic sacrifice of
a horse – with or without an armour-clad rider serving
as an emblematic substitute for the decedent. Moreover,
these charters include various endowments for churches
and monasteries for the sake of memoria, representation
and the salvation of the soul. These donations offer valuable
clues relevant to archaeology, art history, building research
and cultural history in the broadest sense about the
type, design and location of tombs, be it in sacral buildings
or in an exactly designated area of the graveyard, and about
the establishment or the continued use of family tombs as
well as the foundation of altars and chapels associated with
them. Furthermore, late medieval testaments are a precious
information reservoir and in many cases an exclusive record
of artistic treasures long-lost or fallen into oblivion,
for instance memorial media such as gravestones, stained
glass, sculptures, liturgical equipment and paraments decorated
with inscriptions, coats of arms or with actual depictions
of benefactors concerned about their afterlife. In addition,
the testaments are often able to highlight both piety
and liturgy and not least the financial expenditure involved
in such memorial endowments.
Keywords: burial rituals, memoria of the dead, representation,
endowments, charters

In this project I explore the realities of grief through personal experiences and artistic practice. My research considers how remaining objects and memories of the deceased are interconnected and can be re-imagined as artworks to deepen commemoration. It also explores an acceptance of the inevitability of one’s own death, and considers impacts on loved ones still living. The result of this project is a moving image work and a collection of sculptures. I also propose the use of artificial grottoes as spaces that invite viewers to contemplate loss of life and confront their own mortality.

Contextual research draws on the work of contemporary artists dealing with death. The video works of Sophie Calle and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook are particularly discussed in relation to my moving image work, 1 million years. When recounting the death of my brother-in-law, I consider an installation work by Tracy Emin and reflect on a photographic series by Anne Noble. Sculptural works by Mike Kelley and Callum Morton are examined in relation to artificial grottoes as devotional spaces. My art practice has also been informed by Martin Heidegger’s philosophical notion of Dasein as a way of accepting all the possibilities in life, including death.

Progressive discourse regarding death, including alternative funeral rites and ways of dying, is still in its infancy in Western societies. However, talking about death is increasingly becoming less taboo. Over the course of this project, a methodological opportunity for information sharing at Death Café events has been invaluable. While questioning societal concerns with death, this project acknowledges that the conversation currently rests in a transitional space anticipating further development. My final series of works, together with this exegesis, contributes to this conversation on death and memorial through the medium of visual art.