In today's new era, where the body is often filtered, blurred, or virtualized, the physical reality of death remains the ultimate taboo. By directly confronting this terrifying subject and incorporating it into the project by intimate exposure, the work functions as a representation of something that happens, even if it is very difficult to accept and rethink. One of the core ideas of the research is decolonising human — why should we exhibit dead non- human species but preserving an endless man? People in power whose portraits and sculptures we see in museums were depicted as strong and healthy to be seen for future generations. Curiously, before the colonisation started, the main relic was a dead body or replicas of it.
This project investigates the ontological threshold between the living body and the corpse. Beyond the historically "academic" view of the corpse as a simplified map for anatomical study, this work confronts the corpse as a singular, complex entity with a psychological or spiritual weight. The central inquiry explores the moment of departure: the loss of the spirit from the body and the subsequent transformation of the person into an aesthetically terrifying and existentially profound subject. By being produced into the laboratory environment, the work seeks to capture the metaphorical cartography of the dead. A corpse is explored as the last state of being. Through exhibiting reproduced, or fake, organs, the project highlights the tension we tend to avoid by creating alternating the fact of the end and the terrifying complexity that is usually only considered as a negative state rather than an act of non-being. We will never know if we die, the grief belongs to the close ones. Reliquarium mediates death within the cultural sphere. A piece can become utilitarian or can remain as repository of the deceased's memories. The work is going to be firstly presented within the walls of UB supported by a series of lectures by Bogdana Skorik, Alessandra BB and The Death Foundation.
