Charles Bukowski once wrote about the way of death, which is not always equally valued: “to die on the kitchen floor at 7 o’clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you.” (from ‘The Twins’, ‘The Galley Sail Review vol. 1 no. 4’, p. 16, 1959).
He himself knew about the harshness of life and his experiences. Life and death, the time in between and, for some, birth itself can be humiliating, as there is something ‘unheroic’ about a humiliating way of living and dying.
Coming from a culture of hunter-gatherers, we have risen through sedentarisation and the harnessing of plants, animals and each other to become the most influential species in which the display of the collected good has become more central than the good itself. This consequent development harbours an inconsistent progressiveness that reapproaches the oldest traditional form of economy, above all in the form of destruction and exclusion.
An inhumane selection, but one that is all too human.
Technique: digital photography
Year of origin: 2008
