THE SERIES OF
A THOUSAND DEATHS

The Series of a Thousand Deaths, is my firs project in wich I photohraph once and again the scene of my own death. I introduce a human subject: my self; Its the same artist whom is dead and is self-portraited. Through the repetition resource, my intention is -contrary to what all sane would argue- being more on the side of life than on the death side, and being more on the side of being that of disappearing. This project includes The Inquiry 2009, an artist book and video installation.

On repetition and death

What procedure is this to repeat once and again the scene of one’s own death? Appear as it may, it does not have anything of scatology, nor of tanathology. Rather the opposite. Think instead of the mechanism of repetition: all repetition assumes difference, all reiteration implies the introduction of something new.
The bells of a church toll 11 times, for example. For as much as each resembles the previous, every peal -and the last more than any- marks a difference. For as much as it seems like the others, it is the eleventh repetition and it alone that -say- calls us to Mass. The mere repetition in itself produces something.
I repeat to someone the same word three times. I say: “Enough! Enough! Enough!” Even if I consciously employ an identical tone, even if in each case I pronounce the world in the same way, in repeating it and only in repeating it I have generated something strange. I have added a force an insistence, which was not in any single one of the reiterated exclamations.
And that is the paradox: It is not so much what repetition requires of identity and of the old, as that which it creates a new and differently. It is from this basis that we have the strange effect it provokes when applied to something like death: it introduces change and difference to that which is irredeemably indistinct and permanent. Where, if not here then, can one achieve that which Nietzsche sustained: “We have art so that we shall not die of the truth”.

Florencio Noceti
12na. #006 La serie de las mil muertes / Rosana Simonassi.
Asuntoimpreso La Marca Ediciones. Buenos Aires 2007

Always in the open
his lifeless body was seen thrown one, two three times?
and many others they found spoils,
footprints, traces, tracks.
After a while
she was seen alive walking in the streets
entering or leaving her old house.
(text from the first page)

Artist book. Single piece, 2009
Printed by Edo Artis Studio, Innova smooth cotton paper 225g. and Premium Luster Photo paper 260g