With its attention turned towards experimental and innovative works of performing arts, Atalante offers a space for the artistic works, a discourse surrounding those works, and the field at large. During the spring of 2025 we will delve deeper into the various universes of the artists presenting work and make space for a dialogue between the artists, the spectators and the venue.
Presented below is a reflective text by Josephine Gray based on a discussion with Elisabeth Kindler-Abali in connection with their performance Memento Mori – Remember You Must Die at Atalante in April 2025.
Our being in this world is conditioned by two absolutes: birth and death. Neither of these absolutes are known to us. We are told that we were born yet possess no recollection of this event. Similarly we are told that we will die, an event we will not be able to recollect. These two absolutes determine our current being-in-the-world. Second-hand knowledge of these two events are the only possible means of knowledge that we are afforded in this life. In spite of witnessing the birth or the death of another, it will never amount to direct knowledge of the thing-in-itself. In between these two absolutes we embark on a tempestuous journey upon the sea of emotions. Throughout our lives we sail through the ever-recurring states of joy, despair, anguish, contentment, fury, ecstasy and sadness as we discover this world in all its wonder.
The meditation upon death is one that has preoccupied philosophers and artists throughout the ages because not only does it lead to an appreciation of what limitation entails, it also questions what life in its living form is and, what ethical implications we as a mortals are bound to. Indeed, the very term mortal indicates that we are the ones that die. Yet that which lives–the anima–or soul, experiences her living through (e)motions. Hence the Latin expression animi motus still lives on as an indication of the quality of emotion: that it is in constant motion. For Elisabeth Kindler-Abali the choice of creating work under the name animi motus taps into exactly that: the moving aspect of the emotions. For her there is a wish to “move the emotion in the people, to move the society and reveal certain aspects of society.”
In the piece memento mori the meditation on death is central. Elisabeth states that “the intensity of this theme touches me, because we so often want to avoid the theme or the subject, then we face it suddenly and it’s very hard. Why do we avoid thinking about death? It’s an absolute clarity in life, I find this interesting.” To avoid the proximity of death is a fairly new direction Western society has taken. Philosophy, literature and art throughout the Middle Ages up until the Industrial Age is riddled with death and decay through the motifs of vanitas and memento mori. The remembrance of death has been one of the main occupations of art through the symbolic objects of skulls, mirrors, fruits, flowers and other worldly goods. How is it then that the Western world today, in the 21st century, fear death to such an extent that we pretend that it is not there? Especially in times like these, when war-mongering factions are causing the deaths of so many young lives?
To ignore what Elisabeth so aptly calls “the absolute clarity in life” is disturbing and confusing. Yet by examining what kind of emotions are present in states of chaos and confusion brought on by the thought of death, or the actual death of a person, Elisabeth saw potential: “When you hear that you are going to die, or someone close to you [is going to die] you can never really grasp in what emotional state you are in [because] there is nothing to rely on.” This realisation provoked an interest to examine if there is a movement language that can reflect this internal chaos. Questions such as “how should you act, where should you go? Who, or what, is more important? What is the thing in this hour that is calling you?” arose and laid the foundation for her approach to the theme.
The apparent dualism of life and death finds its reflection in the two-part dramaturgy of the piece. Chaos as an instigator of movement gives way to a necessary calmness whereby the threat of death has been exorcised. Elisabeth concedes that “the lives [of those] remaining in the world are the only ones who can act and that they can find calmness in the fact that somebody else has died, or that they themselves will die.” As a visual metaphor for this the white fabric became a means of representing not only the many individual lives that have passed but also our interconnectedness with one another as a large quilted piece of fabric which the piece ends with. The white fabric also signals that “you have been there together [and] that you can be there for this person, even if the person is already dead, that this body is now the main protagonist. It’s not you, it’s you preparing for this persons journey,” as Elisabeth says.
The preparation of the body for the afterlife is an image that saturates our collective unconscious through the many myths around this particular activity. The care that must be taken is paramount because it could lead to the dead person not being able to continue on. If they do not have the required coins to pass to the ferryman, or lay buried without their personal belongings, their fate hang in the balance. Hence, the archetypal theme of death and the relationship between the ones caring for the dead and the dead themselves lay deeply imbedded in our psyche. The externalising activity of caring for the dead and the artistic urge to work with these themes point towards a profound necessity we as a mortal species have of inventing acts that clear our emotions. Just as the idea of a ferry-man helps us to create a continuum after death, so does the externalisation of emotions as actions. Because emotions as such are very strange phenomena. They appear from nowhere and they disappear back to nowhere. We claim to be in the state of an emotion yet we have no way of conjuring up that emotion nor escape from its hold when it is there. It is no wonder that the ancients resorted to construct a frame-work of reality based on spirits and gods who possessed us with their qualities. The experience of enduring emotional states is very similar to that of being possessed. Although we today might not announce that we are possessed by the Furies, we still say that we are furious. The world-building might be different but the experience is the same.
When Elisabeth mentions that she questions everything about her own being in this world it is clear that there resides a great respect for the mystical nature of this life. And more importantly that the interrogation of the self is a practice. It is a practice that the motif of the vanitas and memento mori paintings reminds us to take to heart. For to re-member is to bring body to something. The movements of the emotions, as animi motus suggests, remain the driving force behind what she feels is necessary: “I’m influenced by the emotion of the theme [and] all the work I do is part of a socio-political aspect, stories and images, I use these and develop it further [but] it needs to relate emotionally with me, to feel this is it.” The act of remembering the ones we lost reminds us of our own pending death. A remembrance that might seem natural to want to avoid. But Elisabeth reminds us that once we have accepted that others will pass on we might find peace from which we can allow them to “come back in memories and acts that resemble them.” In a similar fashion the great white fabric that symbolises coffins, paths of life or a quilt might also become a sail that carry us on our journey upon the seas of emotions and apparitions.
Reflektion & text: Josephine Gray