04:42

Freund Hein is an anachronistic German vernacular expression, ‘Hein’ being the impersonation of Death as un unwelcome ‘friend’ knocking on one’s door. In my latest video installation I conceptualized a performance based film project as an exploration of the question of death. Since the human death is typically hidden from everyday life what is the source of our death-image? I invited people of different ages and backgrounds to my studio and asked them ‘to die’ in front of the camera. The participants were free to improvise in whatever way they wanted to pretend the act of dying. Some choose to be ‘shot’, some were ‘stabbed’, some ‘choked’, others said ‘good bye’, laid down and died. The sequence of these performances were mostly short, maximum a few minutes, showing that most people imagine the act of dying as an abrupt event, a crass unexpected rupture in the experience of an everyday time continuum. Also importantly certain filmic preconceptions conditioned mostly by media images determined the improvisations of the participants. The death experience is an event, which can not be easily imagined and anticipated, in actual fact its over-determined character makes people compensate the unimaginable dimension with comedy and overacting instead of drama. There is a great degree of embarrassment involved exposing untimely thoughts and feelings about the death question. The existentialist drive of this subject has basically no place in our daily routines. We tend to block the full confrontation in various ways, which the project shows without judging the process or manipulating it. In the case of the deliberate performance of the death act in this project we want to see how the person copes with this hyperbolic slightly ridiculous task. The result might produce a certain frustration for the viewer as the palette of motifs the participants act out is pretty much limited to our shared cultural preconceptions.