Malia Brazil

installation

 

My final project was in conversation with Abou Farman’s text Towards a Post-Secular Aesthetics: Provocations for Possible Media in Afterlife Art. I explored the ways that we attempt to preserve people through use of what Farman refers to as “objects of memory.” In fact, Farman reveals to his readers, “there are ways in which persons are allowed to quasi-survive their date of biological expiration. The most obvious is through personal objects of memory, those things which resonate with the accumulated traces of the deceased’s life, and which cause intense reactions in surviving loved ones” (3). I also chose to explore the difference between a curated museum space and its effects as a “de-animizer” in contrast with a home alter as a means for “re-animizing” objects that are associated with the dead.