Death Sequence
Death Sequence
“I sure am dying a lot”
2005
Costume Design Commission for Performance
5 Seals
2 Foxes
7 Wooden Toggles
Photography - Marinó Thorlacius
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Death1000000BC is Dual channel video loop by Rebecca Moran. Rebecca engaged us to create for her past life self a costume.
Rebecca’s project developed from an investigation into the concept of dream realities, ideas of parallel existence, and theories of reincarnation. It is a query into the perception of what constitutes being and death, and how we might participate in creating our own idea of self in time.
‘Death Sequence’ (Death200ad, Death1937, Death100,000bc) is a series of video’s based on memories of past lives retrieved using hypnosis and trance with the supervision of a professional regression guide.
And what is revealed through all the re-experience collapsed in one moment? Something as complex as questioning where we are situated in time, and as simple as the realization: “I sure am dying a lot.” For this piece Rebecca needed a costume for a 12 year old girl she once was in Greenland somewhere around 1,000,000 BC.
I told her that she was going to need some old-school. In the installation film the girl wanders out into the ice fields to hunt a bear herself. She is surprisingly unsuccessful. Rebecca is not a 12 year old girl. She is a bit more than that. so to make Rebecca very simply much younger we used the language of pinafore symbolics and strapping.
And to make it as contextual as possible we hunted and killed five adolescent seals, and severed the tails of two snow foxes. They were unimpressed. We made the costume, Rebecca went to Greenland, lived with dogs dried fish and snow, filmed as much as she wanted and is on the way back to Reykjavik to edit.
“….You are 13? And a predator gets you?” Yah “What kind of animal comes to mind?” A bear. Here. “it hits you there and that is fatale?” Yah. “Where you running away from that bear?” No “Did you face it when it happens?” Yah “With other people you were hunting that bear?” Yah. “And that hunt, was it your first hunt? This girl you were, did you realize the bear killed you?” Yes. “Did you have peace with that?” Yah…(pause) It’s cold “Is that the coldness of death?” No. “It was cold before the bear?” Yes. “And do you still have a spiritual connection to this bear?” Uh-huh “Whenever people are killed by an animal there is a special spiritual connection that bonds. And does your mind or part of you go to that bear when it kills you?” Yah “And was the bear killed?” Uh-huh “Do you experience that? And do you realize it is not you that is killed?” Yes. “Is it the claw in your chest that you feel still?” Yes. The ijs bear is here.