Life and Death
Installation
Monotype Layered Gel with Ink Drawings
LED boxes
2014
Valeriya N-Georg
‘Every sensation carries within it thegerm of a dream or depersonalization such as we experience in that quasi-stuporto which we are reduced when we really try to live at the level of sensation.It is true that knowledge teaches me that sensation would not occur unless my bodywas in some way adapted to it, for example, that there would be no specificcontact unless I moved my hand. But this activity takes place on the peripheryof my being. I am no more aware of being the true subject of my sensation thanof my birth or my death. Neither my birth nor my death can appear to me asexperiences of my own, since, if I thought of them thus, I should be assumingmyself to be pre-existent to, or outliving, myself, in order to be able toexperience them, and I should therefore not be genuinely thinking of my birth or my death. I can, then, apprehend myself only as 'already born' and 'stillalive'—I can apprehend my birth and my death only as prepersonal horizons: Iknow that people are born and die, but I cannot know my own birth and death.Each sensation, being strictly speaking, the first, last and only one of itskind, is a birth and a death.’
MauriceMerleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
Photographer: Valeriya N-Georg