Tag: mortality

childmagazine:

Min Jeong Seo – To live on
infusionsbags, roses, 2005

The stalks these flowers are already dried up but their blossoms are preserved and kept fresh by the medical infusin bags. The life-span of every living creature is limited.The infusion bags stand for the progress in medicine and the prolongation of human life.They somehow carry an ambivalent message as they refer to both death and life an the same time. Both states are immanent here. To preserve the beauty of the flowers artifically with the help of the infusion bags points out man’s inclination to repress the fact having to die and to postpone death

Source: childmagazine

“Traveling Through the Dark,” William Stafford

allyourprettywords:

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car  
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;  
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,  
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;  
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;  
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,  
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Peter Tillessen, 40 Jahre Kernspaltung (40 years of Nuclear Fission), (2012)

Press release: “40 Years of Nuclear Fission looks like an old scientific textbook that explains the origins of nuclear fission, illustrated by captivating black and white photographs of sculptural shapes. In fact the book is not an academic but personal compilation by photographer Peter Tillessen. The 40 photographs show excrements of the black-headed earthworm, which aggressively ploughs through a cemetery in Zurich. The pictures of those fragile sculptures are contrasted with parts from the detailed descriptions of nuclear fission from the original book, a text by Darwin that explains the work of earthworms and a text by the artist, who describes his childhood in the atomic age as a son of an atomic engineer. The number 40 is in this compilation no accident: Tillessen took the pictures on his –rainy– fortieth birthday for one of his best friends to pay off his debts from a bet – as he wasn’t a father of a big family (like his father) at the age of 40. That’s what he had pretended to his friend at the age of 27. The design of the book in the book accentuates the biographical fission within the big context of the atomic age: particularly the way the photographer examines the father’s book to reflect his own situation and to become aware of the earth’s fragility”