‘Visions for Crossing' proposes to creatively and sensorially engage with our mortal condition. By looking closely at the gestures of care we offer our dead and developing alternative imaginaries around the threshold process of “becoming imperceptible”. How can we regain a comforting relationship with death? The project aims to share and produce embodied knowledge that resists the dramatic effects of the commercialisation of deathcare, and the general disappearance of the dying from modern society.
Anaïs Chabeur will focus on the "laying out" of the corpse, an ancestral practice that consists in the cleaning of the body, and the way it is taught today, to develop a multichannel audio and video installation. The prism of this specific act will allow her to explore important aspects of our cultural and intimate relationships to death. Questioning what we have lost in its institutionalization and what still persists. She will do so by using a methodology developed through her experience as a palliative care volunteer that emphasizes a deep quality of presence.
(image: Scan of the chapter ‘LAST OFFICES AND CARE OF THE DEAD’ from the book ‘First Aid in the Home’, published in 1946 by Odhams Press, London)
