Author: Lily Selthofner

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Afterlives is a series that brings together interviews, music, poetry, dance, and film. Each track touches on one of life’s most unanswerable, yet compelling, questions: What happens after death? Afterlives is in collaboration with over 40 talented artists and interviewees.

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Afterlives emotionally and tenderly parses through contemporary thoughts on what happens to us after we die. I asked strangers in NYC, California, and Wisconsin, as well as family and friends, what they think happens upon our passing. Watched in order, the series is interspersed with poetry and narrations that arc through life’s journey of contemplation — from loss to spiritual experiences and everything in between. Afterlives brings comfort and reckoning to life is a preparation for death.

The main ethnographic data is sonic. The ears are the last sense to go when we die; they constantly inform our reality, never blinking. Pythagoras lectured from behind a curtain to take advantage of the ear’s power to listen. Capturing the intimate details of each voice informs the process-oriented methods at the root of this work. I curated interview audios with music, visually accompanied by film of nature and dance. Editing with circularity, repetition, and building of themes adds emotional depth to the spoken sentiments.

The diverse array of tracks flow between instrumental, discursive, poetic, and emotional. Each track splices together locations, moods, and choreographies that light up the viewer’s own imaginative realms of meditative peace and future dreams, in between one’s physical and spiritual bodies. Oceans and bluffs merge with snowy winters and soft sunsets.

In the editing process, it became clear to me that each person’s response deserved its full time. I honor the full message and vulnerability of each voice by leaving their response un-fragmented, highlighting each the epistemic merit of each person’s perspective. I curated the series in an order that coalesces their individual messages into an emotional and discursive arc, rather than obscuring the nature of their thoughts toward an imposed external creative vision.

The end result is a 90 minute album with 40 tracks, where the soul-touching sentiments of everyday people on the question of mortality are laid in flowerbeds of music, nature, and dance, that resounds strongly with the truths we hold dear, and unknowns we foray into, as living beings who walk this Earth step in step together until every last one of us meets our mortal fate.