5 MEDITATIONS ON DEATH

Nico Weber - 5 MEDITATIONS ON DEATH

( 5-channel film installation HD 16:9, colour, stereo sound loop)

Nothing is more real than death. Nothing is more of an "absolute imaginary" than death. This is reality! A reality that reveals itself in the unusual video installation FIVE MEDITATIONS ON DEATH by Nico Weber from NOW COLLECTIVE. Images of a clinical autopsy of an anonymous dead body are composed as a poetic, five chapter narrative – disturbing and tender at the same time. It is an artistic and very personal examination of the filmmaker and artist Nico Weber in creative collaboration with cinematographer and editor Marc Nordbruch with the unthinkable, with what concerns us all: the incomprehensible. FIVE MEDITATIONS ON DEATH explores our social relationship to death, which is more evident in the practical handling of a corpse than in abstract representations of the theme. Social communication about death resonates just as much as the iconography of death in the representations of art or the mass media. In FIVE MEDITATIONS ON DEATH nothing is staged, everything is real and takes place in reality. To be able to depict this reality at all is unusual, perhaps even unique. We are familiar with stagings as such, but only this reality leads to the surprising realization that although God cannot be here, the aura of a human body never evaporates. In this sense death is not the end but the beginning. And - unlike in medicine - death in art is an abstraction of possible non-existence. Death is a form of the rule of nature over man – our failure.(c) NOW COLLECTIVE, 2019