2024

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Afterlives is a series that walks the viewer through the minds of mortals, bringing together interviews, music, and poetry, dance, and film. Each track touches on life’s most unanswerable, yet compelling, question: What happens after death? Afterlives is in collaboration with over 40 talented artists and interviewees.

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The premise of Afterlives is simple: I asked strangers in NYC, California, and Wisconsin, as well as family and friends, what they think happens after we die. Each person’s response gets its own segment, set to music with an accompanying short film. Watched in order, the series is interspersed with poetry and narrations that build an emotional continuity and contemplation, that arcs through the interviewee’s discourses on death.

In the process of creation, I considered my main goal to be sonic, with ‘visual accompaniment,’ instead of what is often vice-versa in our visual culture. The ears are the last sense to go when we die, and inform our reality, never blinking. Pythagoras lectured from behind a curtain to take advantage of the ear’s power to listen. That’s why for Afterlives, the soundtrack can standalone as an album — the popularity of music and podcasts through today’s headphones offers a powerful place for art and interview to merge together during everyday moments, encouraging presentness and reckoning with mortality. The videos use the circularity, repetition, and building of music to add emotional depth to the spoken audios on death.

The total album is around 90 minutes, with each of the 30 tracks averaging 2.5 minutes. Some are more instrumental, factual, poetic, or emotional than others. Each track is a mosaic within a mosaic — the accompanying video 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. If you stumble across one track from this series, you will be pleasantly surprised to find there are more along each theme, and many more that offer a different viewpoint, weaving together.

I felt each response deserved its full time, and was best understood when each person’s response was kept whole and un-fragmented. Initially, I had thought to blend them all together into the audio for a whirling visual story. However, the anthropologist in me sought to highlight each response’s own epistemic merit. My creativity could best accentuate them by accompanying and juxtaposing, rather than by morphing the very nature of the responses.

The end result is a 90 minute album that can be watched and listened to as a whole or in small pieces. The soul-touching sentiments of everyday people on the question of mortality are laid in flowerbeds of music, nature, and dance, in an artistic docu-series that resounds strongly with the truths we hold dear, and unknowns we foray into, as human beings, who walk this Earth step in step together until every last one of us meets our mortal fate.