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Lovesong

Lovesong

‘Lovesong’ is a meditative audio-visual poem which explores the quiet experiences of four bodies in their last moments before growing into the earth.

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About the Project

Four corpses lie awake with fading senses under a dying sky, each watching the ephemeral last moments of their decaying sight. A mysterious quiet harmony binds each body in warmth as the night takes them. 

‘Lovesong’ is a meditative audio-visual poem which explores the quiet experiences of four bodies in their last moments before growing into the earth. As each body decays they mutate, each corpse unifying in a symbiotic relation between body, nature, and matter. 

In imagining last moments of roughness and tenderness, silence, and textures, this film presents a poetic exploration of life after death. This dialect is informed by the symbiosis of decay and nature, in which decaying things fall back into the earth and regenerate elsewhere. Here, death is showcased as an assimilation into the ground, as each corpse mutates into a sculptural soil.

The film brings meaning to the silence of death, and aims to resonate tenderness and empathy with a corpse, showing decay as a potential form of creation. ‘Lovesong’ is made in the tradition of a ‘Memento Mori’ - the value of decay is seen from the memory of death – in Latin a `Memento Mori’ means ‘Remember you must die’ – this film aims to celebrate death as a process of change than loss, it engages with the assimilation of death as a natural process of transformation.

Video

Socially, we are afraid to think about death. One is quick to repress discussion - recoils at its inherent grimness - but we know we will die and death is all around us. So why is it so taboo? The process of forgetting and decaying is a transition, a story of decomposition much like the painful growth of a child or a fungus; it's a necessary part of being alive. 

The intention of this film is to imagine and bring value to a corpse as a conscious entity, a living sculpture, that regenerates in its feeding back into the earth. 

In films, the dead infused with life are perceived as ‘zombies’, often without empathy, always groaning and moaning comically. There is a conformity in the idea of a living dead body. A film about a ghost or a corpse is always listed as a ‘Horror’ as if to suggest the nature of death is inherently related to fear, but fear is more complicated than vulgar jump-scares: it's love, it's sadness, it's an empathy for uncertainty. What does this say about our relation to the dying? 

Through Lovesong, we aim to transcend this surface fear by acknowledging the beauty that emerges from sadness, and by finding love in the life of decay. Inside a body is an immense universe, a cosmos of emotion and experience. A scab may appear gruesome, but under a microscope you can see a vast landscape of shapes and patterns - even a dying star bleeds garish colours before depleting. 

Decay possesses a romanticism - fungus, moss, rot, all maintain immense stories of connection within their textures. As a corpse is fossilised, they become engraved like a sculpture, a story is written within the memory they create on the pores of the Earth. It is this story that we would like to tell.

Artists

  • Charlie Jimenez

    Charlie's creations engage with the surreal otherness of existence. Inspired by phenomenology, surrealism, and mythology, the artist explores the ethereal primacy of people and places in the realm of the metaphysical. Bodies here become landscapes of melancholic, absurd, and uncanny spectacles as they act out an intimate dialogue between dreams, identity, and mythology, whilst abject characters wade through the realms of purgatories, death, and spiritual-planes.

  • Melanie Ashton

    Ashton’s artistic creations draw inspiration from worlds that are often glimpsed but seldom “seen,” such as the mysteries of death and transformation, the untamed forests and solitary moors, sorcery, and mythology. Her work laments the gradual loss of our wild within and the dwindling natural wilderness around us. The use of natural materials that degrade, and could eventually be returned to the earth, is a deeply important part of her process in the hope that we may discover the poignant beauty of impermanence.