Show me your dark side.

I met May at Baumhaus; a sustainable innovation lab and event space, around the corner from my temporary studio in Wedding. It was right before the first lockdown. We had an interesting conversation about death. She told me she has a dark side and used to cut herself. Apparently that was necessary. When she saw the ladder in my studio, she came up with the idea of ‘hanging herself with a rope’. We tried different things and ended up with her hanging naked upside down.

She lives near a crematorium. ‘Can you smell that?’ a friend once asked her, but no, you can’t. May wants to be filled with corn after her death, so she turns into popcorn as soon as she’s cremated. Will that scare the people who work there? We laughed at the idea.

I told her about the photo series ‘What Remains‘ by Sally Mann; photos of rotting corpses on a body-farm.

Death is not an end, nature goes on doing its work long after the body has become a carapace.

Sally Mann

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