End of Life • installation and performance
Curated by Equitable Vitrines, September and October 2016. For this immersive version of the End of Life project (Bruce, Wojtasik 2016), the exhibition was installed in a suite on the 27th floor of the Equitable Life building – a modernist office high-rise in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. Reservations were required, a maximum 12 guests once per day at sunset. End of Life is the product of six years spent by John Bruce and Paweł Wojtasik with five individuals at various stages in the process of dying. In preparation for this project, the filmmakers trained to be end-of-life doulas and co-created hundreds of hours of interactions within collaborative exchanges. The Doula works with the dying person, along with those surrounding them, to help design, guide and support their wishes for whatever a “good death” might mean for them. The project’s films and installations employ an immersive, participatory approach intended as an invitation for viewers to explore their body, their senses, and their ability to be present in relation to their own mortality. This video documents aspects of the 2016 installation experience in LA.
(IM)MORTALITY
Moving image installation, presenting the short film ACME Death Kit (Bruce, Wojtasik 2018) and a performance by Matthew Freedman. Park Place Gallery, New York. 2018.
Artist Matt Freedman, during a performance, tells a joke by Groucho Marx: “A man facing execution by hanging steps onto the platform of the gallows, and says, ‘I don’t think this thing is very safe.’” The tension through consciousness of our mortality and an embrace of “transcendence into a potential earthly immortality,” is, according to Hannah Arendt, the opportunity space that supports the existence of politics, the common world, and the public realm. This transcendence is only a possibility, not a guarantee.
La Casita of Dialogo: Restorative Justice for youth in Bogota
2016 was a tense and exciting period in Colombia. For the first time in the world's longest-running armed conflict, a peace negotiation occurred between the government and the guerrillas of Las FARC. Colombians voted to ratify the final agreement to end the violence, but the ratification failed, with 50.2% voting against it. Nevertheless, the deal was eventually signed, leaving a divided society between those who thought healing was possible and those who distrusted that path.
As an offshoot of the peace agreement, Bogota's District and UNODC implemented "Dialogo: RJ for youth," the first Restorative Justice (RJ) program in Colombia. Carlos Medellín was in charge of redesigning "La Casita," the headquarters. Through artistic and storytelling workshops, the design team joined victims, offenders, psycho-social workers, and judges to collect testimonies and understand this traumatic context. As a result, instead of becoming a solving-problem project, "La Casita" became a negotiation process. It is a series of spatial protocols encompassing storytelling objects, restorative curricula, interior design, virtual spaces, communication strategies, and mobile spaces.
Pherecydes Cave
Work-in-progress. Moving images and experiences within real and virtual spaces.
Over the course of more than six years, collaborations with Matthew Freedman evolved from ethnographic film to multimedia live performances to experiments using virtual reality spaces that continued up until the two weeks prior to Freedman’s death in October 2020. This research explores life in proximity to death through engagements in real-time, virtual spaces and questions how we might effectively mediate confrontations with mortality. In particular, this approach addresses and aims to collapse the distances—geographic, physical, psychological, emotional, and social—often created around dying. Virtual reality (VR) spaces designed as dynamic atmospheres for immersive exchange hold great promise in providing unique affordances for how we might learn from experiences at the end of life.
Untitled collective fabulation project
Moving image and performance work-in-progress.
This visual essay introduces processes for and artifacts of transdisciplinary praxis informed through Indigenous, non-Western, and other expanded ways of learning, knowing, and being together as a lens for co-creative expressions in the form of image-oriented narratives. Collective imaginaries are rendered through deep listening and connection with ancestral and Indigenous knowledges, disrupting assumed plots and narratives, and invite unlearning of the normalized patterns of neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, patriarchy and structural racism.