Rituels mortuaires version 2.0 – les visions de Sophie Calle, Christian Boltanski et Marie Darrieussecq

Abstract

A major role of culture is to imply the expansion of the spatial and temporal borders of the being with the aim to abolish them completely. The meaning of death and disappearance occupies a special place in many works. Marie Darrieussecq, Christian Boltanski and Sophie Calle, artists exploiting the imaginary possibilities of letters but also of installations, give us some visions of mortuary rituals adapted in accordance with the changing contemporaneity. The rituals imagined by Darrieussecq, Boltanski and Calle in The House of the Dead, The Records of the Hearts and the film Could Not Grasp the Death, nourished by new technologies, nevertheless break with the idea of removing the dead from a mode where they should no longer have their place. The “cabins” proposed by the artists provide the intermediate space where we can bring the dead closer to our existences; save their holograms, preserve the rhythm of their hearts, catch the moment of passage. Darrieussecq, Boltanski and Calle thus paint new places of memory that could redraw intergenerational links where those who remain and those who have left maintain contact.