MORIR

During the last few years, within my family we suffered a number of losses in a dramatic proportion of time, which made me view death as something usual.
However, it was the last death that differed from the previous ones. It was the first time that someone died in front of me.

Months later, that moment kept chasing me, so I finally decided to do something in order to digest it: I had to give relevance to a moment that seemed to not officially exist, and provide temporary radicality of the change from the ‘breathing’ and ‘not breathing’ entity.

I approached the subject from different perspectives, I could’ve chosen to do a scientific study on death for eg, the stages that had passed those who had lost someone (denial, acceptance, etc), but I soon found that this wasn’t the way. I wasn’t satisfied.
So, in the absence of certainty, I finally chose the metaphor.

To Die is a diurnal process that happens inside a locked room, where light penetrates only through imperfections in the woodwork, window frames and doors. As the day progresses, light intensity decreases and lines become thinner, until finally it disappears as the night sets in.

​I decided to enter the room to experience for myself, what turned out to be an absolutely practical and empirical exercise. Once inside, after allowing a few minutes for the eyes to adjust to the darkness, I found myself presented with lines and geometrics caused by the light entering the room. I dedicated my time in that room to pursue and absorb all those testimonies with my camera, using long exposures before that light disappeared.

No intention to slow down the process, to avoid the inevitable. All photographs of Morir would eventually merge to black. It is that instant rescue, though weak and for a short time, there is still light.

I just wanted to empathize with a person, sharing the solitude of her transit between life and death.
Before she came to my mind to remain as that chalk stain you can never erase completely from a blackboard.

The video made to die go beyond its photographs. As with the installation, the idea was to more precisely develop what I was looking for with this project.

I decided to type in English as this is morphologically and phonetically more flexible than my native languages, and better suggests the ambiguity of feelings that the project tries to show; contradictory attitudes to the same event, comparable to a flexible lexicon where certain words are spelled differently and sound alike, or simply changing one letter which leads to an opposite meaning.

Once I approached the project knowing what I wanted, Plainsong joined my walk from the beginning, I didn’t look for it. This song by The Cure was to become the soundtrack of a whole process from beginning to the end; because I realised it was exactly what I was trying to explain.

Two people talking about the inevitable. The Final Acceptance and the Dismissal.
The conversation I would have liked to have had and I did not.