TanatoLab. A Laboratory of Creation and Experimentation on Death
Is there an alternative to our classical notion of individual death? Can we imagine other ways of living and dying that go beyond this dichotomy?
Tanatolab is a laboratory of experiments on death within the framework of the exhibition “Ciencia Fricción” where we explore modes of dying that expand the classical notion of individual death: transition from one existence to another, transformation and change, liminal space or nexus, decomposition in codependency. Throughout the process, we propose creating a comfortable, caring, and judgment-free space to explore different experiences and approaches to the idea of death.
Drawing from Donna Haraway’s thinking and the research “Morir Guay. Voces y relatos para no tener miedo” (Dying Cool: Voices and Stories to Not Be Afraid), we share textual, auditory, and audiovisual documents to explore various perspectives on the question of death. We engage in participatory dynamics through writing, bodywork, fermentation, and the observation of organic matter. The workshop offers a broadening of perspectives regarding death and delves into the connections between transformation, biopolitics, time, narrative and fiction, the human and the beyond-human, codependency, and ritual.
The workshop is structured into four sessions:
- Dying in the Capitalocene: Anxiety about the end of life is widespread in our society. Paradoxically, death is taboo in our culture, something that makes us uncomfortable and that we avoid facing. Through a creative writing exercise, we explore current imaginaries of death and propose gentler approaches.
- Suspension of life: Using our bodies and through a guided meditation exercise, we enter a liminal space where we can connect with sensations in a place “between” birth and death. We create a space to inhabit fear, strangeness, the corporeality that sustains life and death—the powerful space from which we detach from the material to connect with a continuous transformation process, a body that is born and dies.
- An apple is my mother, and a worm is my daughter: Through a speculative exploration exercise, we investigate the links between death and time in non-human relationships, as well as the presence and belonging to life systems on non-anthropocentric scales. How can we understand life and death in existences and processes that go beyond the human body?
- Kefir never dies: The microbial continuum decomposes organic matter, nourishing other lives—existences that do not age, that do not know programmed death. We engage in living processes of fermentation and putrefaction, in composting as an earthly condition, and question the cultural limits of disgust and decay.
Tanatolab took place at CCCB in Barcelona on September 30, October 7, 21, and November 4, 2021, from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm.