”Elämän ja kuoleman imagot” – kuvan, kodin ja taide-elämyksen hybridi

Authors

• Petri Kaverma Taideyliopisto

Abstract

“The images of life and death” is an artistic research project that explores the cultural and visual aspects of dying. It pursues new visual ideas and produces new material artefacts of death, such as coffins and funeral urns. Perhaps such new imagery may help people to cope with their fear of dying and increase their respect for life.

Death is a theme with particular resonance in our society that admires eternal youth and strives to make death invisible. Death is a theme with particular resonance in our Finnish society. At the meantime “Christian imagery and language, which have monopolized the Finnish landscape of death, are losing their meaning, and Finns are now seeking alternative ways to verbalize and frame their experiences at the end of life“, as researcher Maija Butters mentioned in her synopsis for her research plan (Butters, 26.11.2015)

Presently, there are no updated images of death in our culture. Of course, we have the numinous black cars and coffins covered by shiny white synthetic fabrics, but we no longer see death through these worn-out attributes of sorrow. It could even be argued that the very object of dying – the body, the corpse – has consequently disappeared. A dead person has turned into an abstraction, and, thus, our experience of death has lost its meaning. The invisibility of death has made death all the more frightening for us.

“The images of life and death” will develop a new kind of coffin concept. During the owner’s lifetime, the coffin will function as a piece of art, and as the owner passes away, the coffin will become the final resting place. Thus, the owner lives a long and happy life with the artwork, finally to be buried in it. In the end, also the artwork will vanish, losing the form it originally held. What remains is a sort of framework that contained the parts of the coffin. This framework, now empty, will stay with those left grieving as a tangible memory, an object for reminiscence.

The project creates a set of conceptual and visual tools that can give us a new sensitivity about our life, a framework by which to ask ourselves how we feel today, how our life looks at the moment, whether it feels right and meaningful for us. In this sense, the project is extended from the artistic or visual realm to that of language.