Christian Boltanski: No Man's Land

No Man's Land, 2010

At 65, Mr. Boltanski has spent a career producing vivid reminders of life’s inevitable passing. His engagement with both death and survival has drawn glowing comparisons to the poetry of John Keats, and also been denounced — particularly when his fascination with the Holocaust is most evident — as pornographic and exploitive.

Boltanski's "No Man's Land" (2010) comprises of 25-foot-tall pile of used clothing, a mechanical claw on a crane and the sound of heartbeats reverberating in the background. 

Boltanski in 2 separate interviews (here and here)

Clothes and death:

"It’s used clothing. I’ve always imagined that used clothing and a photo of somebody and a dead body are nearly the same. They’re all objects related to the missing person. On the floor there are mostly coats, which more clearly take the form of people. On the “mountain” are other types of clothing that are all mixed up. You can’t imagine these people. There is no more individuality."

" If you have lost your father, what are you going to do with his clothes? You know that the clothes belonged to the man, and you don’t know what to do with them. And also, the fact that we don’t know if we are going to survive until tomorrow, especially for people who are older—we are just walking, in a way, with mines, and the mines can go [makes sounds mimicking an explosion], and you see plenty of your friends dying, and you don’t know why you are not dead and if you’ll die tomorrow."The crane is a little like the finger of God, or like destiny. It moves a bit like it’s choosing someone, but it really moves at random. It grabs a clawful of clothing, lifts it into the air and drops the clothing back onto the pile."

"I’ve always been interested in trying to understand why one person survives and someone else doesn’t. Most of the time you don’t find answers, but what is important is to ask the question. A big issue for me is the uniqueness, the importance of each person, yet, at the same time, after two or three generations you disappear totally."

Hearbeats and death:

"...for five or six years I’ve collected heartbeats for a library I’m creating on an island in Japan, and I already have 60,000 heartbeats from a lot of countries. We will collect more here in the Armory. On July 18th my library will open, and it will be possible to go there and to say “I want to hear the heartbeat of Mrs. Smith.” After some time, all the heartbeats will belong to dead people, and this will become an island of dead people, in a sense. You can collect heartbeats but you can’t preserve people." 

Memory and death:

"In fact, it’s like when you see a photo of somebody, you feel more that this person is dead."

(Interviewer): The secondary presence makes you feel the absence even stronger.