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 other people, later in the form of our own end. We are all mortal as we were two thousand years ago, but we live in a time when it seems possible for the very first time in hirstoy that it will

not always be like that. Our life expectancy is as high as never before and the ubiquity of death from earlier times, when most of the children didn’t even reach adulthood, has been replaced by a shadowy existence in hospitals and nursing homes. Only in mass media death still appears on

a large scale - but only as an abstract event featuring strangers, as a violent act or simply as unforeseen disaster.

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 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 in which photography and drawing, philosophical, scientific and belletristic snippets of text, notes and diary-like scripts are put together to form a space of reflecting on death.

The perspective oscillates between personal narratives on the one hand, 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 considerations. The aim of the work is to bring questions to the surface, which are significant for all of us, but are mostly repressed. We ask

about the meaning of life on a regular basis - but much less often about the meaning of death.

Does it have a meaning at all?

What is death anyway? Is it even? Should we be afraid of it? Can we abolish it? And above all: do we want a life without an end? Where do we as species actually want to get with the idea of progress? What is our goal? Do we have one? What role do ends and boundaries play in our world? And what role plays time? What makes us human? Does how we treat each other have something to do with how we think or not think about death? And does the way in which we design our planet and deal with other species also relate to it? And finally: would we live a better and more meaningful life if we learned to accept death?

year 2019

pages 112

dimensions 280 x 320 mm

copies 10 + 1 original

isbn 978-0-36-804007-8

NikolaI

Marcinowski