Défilé #4
The human fear of passing away is hidden behind obsessive adornment of the body. Death is presented in its “luxury” version which, despite all efforts, only serves to emphasize the deadness of the corpse.
'In Défilé we explore the way individuals deal with the concept of mortality by juxtaposing images of death with images of beauty, in this case – high fashion. In pairing fashion with death, we have found a modern-day counterpart of the traditional juxtapositions of love and death and beauty and death.
To conceive of death only in conjunction with something else appears a fundamental aspect of human nature, as if to take the burden off thinking of death exclusively. An obsession with fashion, symbolising temporality, can be seen as a way to deal with the fear of death. It is an ancient preoccupation, as can be seen in the elaborate rituals associated with death in both Western and non-Western cultures. Humans have always attempted to decorate death, based in part on a desire to ward off death.
At the same time, we intend to leave participants/spectators with a sense of the circularity of life, and, up to a point, make death easier to contemplate. It is this idea that we intend to explore in our project – in granting these morbid forms a sense of dignity and beauty in death; or, in a sense – an afterlife.'
