CONSOLATION IN THE FACE OF DEATH

This series was my graduation of my Master’s. It consisted in a series of variations on a self portrait that featured my image of me in a bridal dress. This act is based on the Romanian ritual that says if a young person dies before he/she gets married, the burial will reproduce an actual marriage, where somebody will impersonate the groom/bride and some of the rituals performed at the weeding will be doubled with the burial ones, so that he/she can pass through all the stages of life before going in to the grave.

I always had the anxiety that I would die young, the fear of dying is still present in my thoughts. This has lead over the years to several projects that researched funeral rituals in my home villages, where my grandparents used to live.

A grand impact on my consciousness was an early experience of witnessing the burial of one of my cousins as a child.

Even though I never knew him, I was obliged to go, and because he was really young, 19 or 20 , a lot of people came. The festivities for the funeral were really impressive, with 2 white horses. On one horse, there was a beautiful girl dressed in a bridal gown, with over 250 young people in cortège and the blend with the nuptials ceremony was so dramatic, accompanied by dirge songs, exacerbating the pain that he didn`t celebrate this important event and the fact that he was so young.

This project investigates these pagan rituals through some audio interviews, conversations with older women in my village about these rituals (the conversations are only in Romanian).