Villt blóm/Wildflower: 53% Hefð/Tradition: 56% Hátíð/Carnival: 52%
What is the aim of the project?
and beggars, would perform so-called Rudos; traditional folk psalms. Those psalms were chanted hours and hours on end, occasionally interrupted by cries and lamentations. On the third day of the wake, the coffin was pulled shut and at times candles were used to sear a cross on the inside of the lid before it was closed. I have regularly visited Lithuania since 2002 and by chance I met a Lithuanian man who had old family photos in his possession. I was pulled in by photographs from his grandfather’s vigil. Later I learned that Lithuanians want little to do with these memories, the photographs tend to end up in closed boxes or being disposed of, thrown into a grave or into the fire. I heard of a woman who believed that these photographs had a bad aura and that she had been advised to burn them so their misfortune would not plague her. Many found it odd that I wanted to collect the photographs but most lent or gave me their photographs gladly. I now have in my collection around 3000 photographs that portray this ritual through the course of more than a century.
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L: The camera is a medium that we often use to capture immortality. But here I came across the case of people not striving to preserve the images – on the contrary, people wanted to forget about them. This got me contemplating if it is perhaps the performance itself that is important to people: the performance of taking a photograph during a funeral. The performance seems to have become more important than preserving the memory of the deceased. The photographs of the deceased and their family were taken in order to preserve and reinforce the family-bonds of people that met on very rare occasions, such as viewings or funerals. Subsequently, I started to consider these images not necessarily as images of death but as portraying the life all around. This brought other elements to my attention: the living spaces, the flowers, the children, the typefaces, the iconography, the gestures and the attire. I turned my attention to the various symbols and noticed that the cross is an all-pervasive symbol, not only in a material sense as the cross in the hand of a priest, in the church or on a flag, but also in the immaterial interplay of forms between mourners and the deceased. The living stand but the deceased are lying down and together the