Why Not Die? The result must be that it is okay to die. This main sentence of the small video-essay resonated when i first heard Axel say it. Together with a group of a dozen artists and theorists (“The Diagonals”) we were preaparing a group exhibition at an old pathology. The main topic or question of our group meetings was “What’s holy today?”, in a world where we have killed god kind of a long time ago and live in a rather disenchanted horizontal plain. What can be holy, spiritual, magic, what has a metaphysical brilliance today – the vertical as we called it – and how can the horizonal (deadly?) plain become more vertical? The artistic interventions at the old pathology tried to be those diagonalisations, as our idea was that art and artistic work yet has the potential to bring that vertical aura to our rather horizontal world.

Why Not Die deals with the topic of death, the question of and the quest for dying, abstract, of course, it stirs up associations of the relation of death and artistic work, the question for example what happens when creation and or creativity ends. This – in times of creative capitalism – seems an urgent question, as the constant imperative seems to be that you have to be creative. But what when everybody has to be, constantly? Can creativity die? Can art die? And Why (can it) Not Die…?

Filmed by Anissa Taibi and UIUS. Text by UIUS. In cooperation with Lale, Luise, Sofia, Steff, Vicky, Yousif, Zerufael at TA Miltenberg 2019 and DIAGONALE/1.