Danse Macabre

My research has brought me to the notion of death and the universality of it. I am both fascinated and fearful of death. I constantly question existence and death; It comes from a personal place.

Christian Boltanski talks about it in his book "The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski" (p. 136), mentioning how he thinks one has to befriend death since one cannot avoid it, even though he has an unhealthy fear towards it ultimately; a pathological fear that made him fear even visits to the hospital.

There is a kind of satire that I did in my 'Ephemera' project previously that I would like to highlight. It employs dark humour and the trivialization of life and death (a so-what, we-work-consume-die type of attitude). Death is also the common denominator of all life on earth. Death does not discriminate.

Danse Macabre is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. They were produced to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now lost mural in the Saints Innocents Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424–25. The apparent class distinction in almost all of these paintings is completely neutralized by Death as the ultimate equalizer, so that a sociocritical element is subtly inherent to the whole genre.

The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel.