fictions for after a life

speculative creation lab on death led by Inés Plasencia Camps

Just as the idea of the Christian paradise was developed as a fiction aimed at exercising social and economic control by the Church, contemporary literary, artistic, and cinematic creations about what happens after death reflect a specific political order and affective frameworks. That which we imagine for those we have lost—individually or collectively—reproduces a vision of the world in terms of justice, reparation, or reconciliation, integrating mourning into a future that, we want to believe, remains to be written. It is an exercise in giving continuity to our dead in their new form, but also one of utopia and denunciation, for the violence surrounding many deaths prevents us from closing their stories.

In this lab we will explore possibilities of visual and writing-based creation to speculate about our griefs and fears, and we will imagine—through examples and our own projects—what death could be like and how our dead might speak to us. Not because we believe that is “what truly happens,” but because of everything fiction offers us as a form of thought. Reclaiming narrative is an exercise in conscious mourning that keeps alive the desire of those who have departed, giving us agency over grief and death that is often denied to us.

bio

Inés Plasencia Camps is a curator, researcher, and educator. She is currently an associate professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid and at Duke University in Madrid. Her main lines of research focus on visual arts and the visual culture of colonialism and its continuities, applied to debates, questions, and ways of critically challenging contemporaneity. At present, the exploration of fear and death through contemporary artistic and cultural practices lies at the heart of her work.

DU-DA is a collective dedicated to mediation, research, and artistic production. Morir Guay (“Cool Death”) was born in 2019 thanks to a grant from La Escocesa and resulted in the book Morir guay. Voices and Stories to Not Be Afraid. This line of research, focused on dominant discourses and protocols around death and their counter-narratives, is structured around a series of methodological experiments based on the hypothesis that if we create a caring space to break the taboo around death, we can initiate a paradigm shift to foster sovereignty and ecology in dying. +info

This activity is part of the program Esto también pasará (“This Too Shall Pass”), a space for the intersection of art, thought, and experimentation around the cyclicality of life and death, promoted by the collective DU-DA.

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