Live well, Die well (2024 – In process)

Live Well, Die Well is an ongoing project that questions how contemporary societies have transformed death — once a natural process — into a medicalized, commercialized, and polluting industry. Initiated after the COVID pandemic, the project reflects on the absence of collective mourning and the urgent need to imagine more ethical, ecological, and meaningful ways to live with death.

Through installations, videos, performances, and participatory workshops, Live Well, Die Well explores the biological and spiritual cycles that connect humans to the earth. It investigates topics such as food offerings for the dead, cemetery ecology, mourning rituals, and the commodification of funerals. Works like The Passing Body, Custom Made Funerals, and Diamonds in the Sky poetically expose the tension between decay and regeneration, loss and transformation.

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Wool coffin surrounded by plants from the Jardí Fènix association, Pere Pruna Civic Center, Barcelona, ​​Temporals Program
Wool coffin surrounded by plants from the Jardí Fènix association, Pere Pruna Civic Center, Barcelona, ​​Temporals Program

Rooted in research between France and Spain, the project advocates for a “return to humus” — an awareness of our organic finitude and our interdependence with all living beings. Drawing on thinkers like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, Live Well, Die Well proposes an ecosophical vision of death as part of life’s continuum: we are not separate from the world, but compost within it.

The project was selected for the Temporals itinerant contemporary art program in Barcelona.

Partial view of The Passing Body exhibition at Performinstanbul, September 2024

The Passing Body performance carried out as part of a residency at Performistanbul
Photos by Gülbin Eriş








Mural Custom made Funerals at the Pere Pruna Civic Center, Barcelona, ​​2025, Temporals Program
Mural Custom made Funerals at the Pere Pruna Civic Center, Barcelona, ​​2025, Temporals Program
Custom made Funerals Posters
The Cemetry and the forest at the Pere Pruna Civic Centre, Temporals Program
The Cemetry and the forest at the Pere Pruna Civic Centre, Temporals Program
The Cemetry and the forest at the Pere Pruna Civic Centre, Temporals Program

Frame from the video Before we made a better living
Frame from the video Before we made a better living
Frame from the video Before we made a better living
Frame from the video The Gravedigger
Frame from the video The Gravedigger
Offerings workshop with students from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, March 2023
Offerings workshop with students from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, March 2023

The Passing Body
Video performance, Editing Gülbin Eriş, MP4, 1920 x 1080 px, 28 min, 2024
Before we made a better living
Video MPA, 1920 x 1080 px, 5min19, 2024
The Gravedigger
Video MP4, 1920 x 1080 px, 3min27, 2024