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Maa Kheru – can you hear me?
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of Cultural Sciences.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-0575-7075
2023 (English)In: First Monograph of Christian Kosmas Mayer / [ed] Phileas. The Austrian Office of Contemporary Art., Wien: DISTANZ Verlag GmbH , 2023Chapter in book (Other academic)
Sustainable development
SDG 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels
Abstract [en]

The electronic sounds of the recreated voice of a male mummy reaches me through the speakers, and I am mesmerized. I know that it is generated from the recreated anatomical materiality of a human being that has been dead for two thousand years. Yet, the synthesized voice sounds electric, as if from a future I have not yet seen. I feel suspended - like a lost point in a scatter diagram in a constant flow of time. Is this a person’s voice I am hearing? How much of him still resides in what is left in his body today?  Human remains, from the fresh cadaver preserved in an old anatomical collection, to the burnt, broken and dissolved fragments carefully curated in museums, constitute something elusive and enigmatic that escapes our fundamental categorizations. Situated on a moving scale between scientific specimens and biomaterial on the one end, and the materiality of a lived life and past personhood on the other, they transgress fundamental boundaries of human culture as they are both object and subject, both life and death. In her essay The Powers of Horror[1], linguist, psychoanalyst and philosopher Julia Kristeva discusses the concept of the abject as a category situated between the subject and the object. The cadaver, she argues, is the ultimate example of this. By challenging fundamental categories of human culture, the abject inspires conflicting responses in us, such as horror and dread, even disgust – but also, and simultaneously, fascination and desire. It is this situatedness in-between categories that makes human remains both problematic and fascinating. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Wien: DISTANZ Verlag GmbH , 2023.
Keywords [en]
body, person, death, human remains, liminality, art, voice
National Category
Arts
Research subject
Humanities, Archaeology; Humanities, Art science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-127778ISBN: 9783954765379 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:lnu-127778DiVA, id: diva2:1837725
Projects
Ethical Entanglements. The Care for Human Remains in Museums and Research
Funder
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, FOE20-0012Available from: 2024-02-14 Created: 2024-02-14 Last updated: 2024-02-16Bibliographically approved

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Nilsson Stutz, Liv

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Citation style
  • apa
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