FLIEßENDES LEBEN STILL IM RAUM | nikolai-marcinowski

fließendes leben still im raum

Death is a phenomenon that we all have to deal with sooner or later - first as the disappearance of creatures around us, later in the form of our own end. We are mortal as we were two thousand years ago, but we live in a time when it seems possible for the very first time in history that it will not always be like that. Our life expectancy is higher than ever and the ubiquity of death from earlier times, when most of the children didn’t even reach adulthood, has been replaced by a shadowy existence in hospitals and nursing homes.

At the same time billions are invested in research programs that aim to digitize consciousness or improve the human genome. Influential and prominent personalities predict the end of age-related and disease-related death within a few decades to centuries. The twentieth and twenty-first century beliefs - technological progress, economic growth and control by knowledge - deny limitedness as an integral part of life. This work on the contrary seeks direct confrontation and engagement with finitude, time and death. It finds beauty in the imperfect, in the dissolving, in processes of decay and disappearance.

„fließendes leben still im raum“ is a dense and multi-layered web of images and thought fragments, a handmade book, a large collage of photography and drawing, philosophical, scientific and belletristic snippets of text, notes and diary-like scripts forming a space of reflecting on death.

The perspective oscillates between personal narratives, such as the recent death of my father, the ending of relationships and life stages, as well as current social discourses, historical backgrounds, and philosophical concepts.

The aim is to bring questions to the surface, which are significant for all of us, but are mostly repressed. Such as: Should we be afraid of dying? What is death anyway? Do we really want to be immortal? What makes us human? And would it not make our lives more meaningful if we started giving death a place in our lives again?

year 2019

pages 112

dimensions 280 x 320 mm

copies 10 + 1 original

isbn 978-0-36-804007-8

NikolaI

Marcinowski