Near Death Experience

AV live performance, Rome / Italy

2011

Concept:
The installation has the idea to visually represent the altered state of NDE (Near death experience). Through the NDE the death doesn’t only becomes thinkable, but also livable: there’s the experience of death. On 2 screens short clips are projected (5 to 30 seconds). The projected images refer to moments of one person’s life and one person’s experience beyond death. Also the images represents details of special moments, are filmed in a subjective way (so the audience becomes the ‘victim’) and they are projected in an aleatory way. Between 2 clips there’s a short blank as an eye blink; the sound is very important and helps to identify the moments. It’s known that a certain percent of the persons that lived a serious incident or a trauma, had thought, feared or perceived that the own death was imminent; they refer to have been the protagonists of an experience described as fantastic and in the same time ‘real’, like a ‘trip in the world of dead’ described as a place of absolute peace, serenity and tranquility, very similar to the world described by Dante in ‘Divina commedia’ or the world imagined and described by the Egyptians and Tibetans in ‘The book of Dead’. The ones that were on the point of dying or they were declared clinically dead, had then told they were ‘out of the body’ so they could see their own body from outside; they entered in heavenly places, in a kingdom of light and love. Some of them had shortly seen their own past & future life, then they arrived in a place where they had an obstacle or they even met the ‘Light(Angel)’ who prevented them to pass and constrained them to ‘get back to the body’.

The visuals and sound were digitally created using only the software Resolume.

Performed once in 2011 at Live Performers Meeting, Rome (Italy).