Death Down Under | Kathy High | 2013 | work-in-progress | 64 minutes.

This video was shot in Western Australia and follows the collaboration of a young fashion designer/artist and funeral celebrant, Pia Interlandi, and a forensic scientist, Ian Dadour. An experimental research project was created between them, allowing Pia to test out her fashion-for-the-dead and Ian, an entomologist who studies homicide, to research clothing decay on dead (animal) victims. Pia and Ian had to amass a team to wash, dress and bury 21 dead pigs on a kangaroo reserve. Then they dug up the remains over one year’s time to examine the decay of the ritual burial garments. "Death Down Under" follows the entire process from gathering the slaughtered pigs to the results in the laboratory. This video looks at our care for the dead - be they human or non-human animals, and at ideas of green burials and the ecology of death.
   
Nascentes Morimur | Pawel Wojtasik | 2008/2013 | 20 min.

Nascentes Morimur is an act of defamiliarization, not only of what we know about our own bodies, but also of whatever we may have learned of the autopsy procedure... The light is clear, colors vivid, and marked by deep shadows. Movement is slowed as we settle into steady, deliberate rhythms; the image shifts in and out of focus, and each gradual fade to black is like an exhalation. All this is bracketed within a slowly contracting and expanding frame, opening wide to reveal glistening viscera, and narrowing again to an abstract sliver of color; in a certain sense, it’s an autopsy of an autopsy.