Transcript

Death Like You've Never Seen It Before | Joanna Ebenstein | TEDxNewYork

Translator: Ivana Krivokuća
Reviewer: Alice Yang I grew up in California in the 1980s, which was a very sunny,
extroverted culture. And I had an interest
in darkness and death, which did not make me very popular. I kept dead animals in my room,
thanks to my father back there. And I started clubs
where we wrote essays for fun and I loved books where - spoiler alert -
the main character dies. I don't know why so many young
adult novels are like that, but they are. The antidote to my life in California
were summers spent with my grandparents in Peekskill and Mahopac, New York. My grandparents
were both Holocaust survivors and they both studied medicine. And they provided my sisters and I
with a love for art and culture, and also a no-nonsense approach
to life, death and the body. When my grandmother was in her 90s
and her health very much in decline, and having lost her husband
of 60 plus years, she would often tell me
that she wanted to die, that she was ready to go, and that she couldn't tell
anyone else but me. And she would call me
her father confessor. And I remember marveling at the fact
that it had become so difficult to talk about such topics in our society and wondering how
that could've come about. How did it become taboo
to talk about, as I saw it, just about the most important thing
you could say to another human being? Much of my work
over the past 20 or so years has been trying to grapple
with these questions, and my techniques
were to research and photograph as many of these ways
of dealing with death as possible with an eye towards practices
that were once prevalent and high culture that now seem bizarre or morbid. The more I looked around,
the more I began to believe that the way we look at death
in America today is by far the exception
rather than the rule. It seems to me that every other time
or culture has had a dignified discourse around what is essentially
maybe the universal problem - the fact that we're all going to die
and the mystery of that fact. I really got into this stuff when I went
to Europe for the first time in my youth, and when I was there,
I got introduced to a lot of objects that kind of merged death and beauty in ways that really shocked
my California sensibility. For example, on the obligatory
Sound of Music tour, right behind where
the Von Trapps got married are these five jeweled skeletons. I had never seen anything like this. What were these? And it's Salzburg Cathedral
I was introduced to the concept of the memento mori
via this wax anatomical Jesus Christ, a dead Jesus. Memento mori are essentially objects
created for the sole purpose of reminding viewers that they will die, with the hope
that they will live a holy life and thus avoid the fires of hell. They were very popular in the 17th century
when Europe was wracked by plague. I was also introduced
to objects made from human hair, usually that of the deceased,
like this piece. Portraits of dead nuns and post-mortem photographs, which were popular in the Victorian age
when child mortality was very high. They say three in five children died
before reaching adulthood, and photography was very expensive, so this might be the only photograph
the family had of a child. I also went to ossuaries or charnal houses
such as Sedlec Chapel outside of Prague and this one, which is
San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan. These are quite common in Europe
where until very recently to be buried was more like
a temporary rental than a purchase, so as soon as your body
was clear to flesh, it would be moved aside
to make room for new bodies and your bones would be used
in these kind of decorative arrangements in holy spaces where they
could still be visited. As i got older, I continued
to do these kind of trips. I went to the Palermo catacombs,
which is in Sicily. It's been a tourist attraction
for well over a hundred years, and here the Capuchin monks
mummify and display in their Sunday best the bodies of those
wealthy enough to afford it in the 17th and 18th centuries. And I began to travel the churches to look at objects
from the Catholics called the saints, things like relics which are body parts,
remains of saints and martyrs that are believed to have
usually magical healing properties. Or corpus sancti, which are
essentially effigies of saints that also house their sacred remains -
that's an arm bone, and those are her real teeth. If anyone has gone
to see St. Theresa in Rome, she is directly across from that. And also incorruptible saints
whose body is a sign of their sanctity, simply don't decay, so that's
Saint Catherine of Siena. I also began to be interested
in what sort of things might be happening today
in other cultures, so I started an annual trip to Mexico, where death is very famously embraced
with the humor and whimsy, very unlike our attitudes here today. This is best known through its ceremonies
of Day of the Dead, which is essentially a hybrid
between indigenous practices and Catholic All Saints'
or All Souls' Day, with a bit of Halloween thrown in
for good measure. On this day, children
are given sugar skulls with their names written on them, and children, adults, and sometimes even pets
are dressed as skeletons. People also make altars
to their deceased loved ones in public places and at the cemetery. Then they head to the cemetery
where they spend the day. And a candlelit night, eating, drinking,
singing, laughing, crying, hanging out with their families
and welcoming intruders like myself. I was also in Seoul; I went to the Seoul cemetery
for Korean Thanksgiving Day or Chuseok, which is not that unlike Day of the Dead. On this day, people go to the cemeteries,
they tidy the graves of their ancestors and eat, drink, play with the children
and engage in ritual bowing. I also stumbled upon
this interesting thing going on today in Fontanelle cemetery. This is an ossuary in Naples and here women adopt
these abandoned skulls - abandoned, anonymous skulls - and they clean them, they care for them
and they make them these little houses and they pray for the soul's speedy trip
through the purgatory in the hopes that when they get to heaven,
they might help their friends on Earth. This is still going on today. All of this material ultimately led me
to what my current body of work is about, which is essentially medical museums. Medical museums are museums
that house human remains or simulacrums of human remains
in order to educate sometimes medical students,
sometimes a general public and sometimes both. As you can see,
sometimes the objects within are quite shocking
to a contemporary sensibility, and I think that it's because they blur
a lot of our lines between things like art and science, death and beauty,
religion and medicine and education and spectacle. One example is this table, not made of stone inlays,
at first appears, but actually a petrified human brain,
blood, bile, liver, lung and glands with the centerpiece
of a petrified human foot and augmented by four human ears. This was made by an Italian doctor
in 1866 for Napoleon III. Or this beetle skeleton tableau
called a profane relic and created in the 17th century. Or this écorché or flayed figure
made from a real man and a real horse by the French anatomist Honoré Fragonard. Fascinatingly, Honoré Fragonard
was the cousin of the much less macabre and very well-know painter
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who is most famous
for this painting, "The Swing". But of all the objects I saw
in the medical museum, to me the most bizarre, perplexing,
fascinating and seductive was the anatomical Venus. These are full-sized wax women
with real human hair and glass eyes. They were created
to teach a general public, not medical students,
but a general public about anatomy. Some of them are dissectable, and others are
in kind of a permanent state of auto-dissection, I would say. Some of them have strings of pearls -
this one had a golden tiara - and they were created in the 18th century. This was the first one that was created
and she was created to be the centerpiece of the first truly public
science museum in Florence, Italy, called today La Specola. You can still see her there in her original rosewood
and Venetian glass case. I very much recommend it.
It's right next to palace Pitti. My fascination with these objects led to me trying to photograph
and research all of them that I could, which culminated in a book
that was published earlier this year. It was well doing work for an exhibition
about medical museums called "Anatomical Theatre", that I started a blog
called Morbid Anatomy. I intended it merely
to be a research tool, a way to sort through my photographs
and my material and to figure out what I wanted to say in the exhibition. But before long, people started to ask if they could borrow books
on my bibliography, as it developed an audience. A lot of books on my bibliography were
out of prints or very difficult to find, so I felt I should
open it up to the public. So I opened up the Morbid Anatomy library and the now-defunct
Proteus Gowanus gallery in Brooklyn, New York. And then, Halloween. Around Halloween 2012 I met this woman,
Tracy Hurley Martin. I was giving a talk at the time
about Santa Muerte. I don't know how many of you
know about Santa Muerte, but it literally translates
to saint or holly death, and this is a form of devotion
that originated in Mexico, in which death as a woman
is worshiped or venerated as a saint - one saint among the Catholic panoply. It's now spread around the diaspora; you'll see it all over New York
now that you've seen this. This is a shop window in Queens,
so this is a life-size... Well, the cat's there for size.
Not quite life-size, but pretty big. But keep an eye out, you'll see it at Botanica
and sometimes even grocery stores. I've been traveling
around The United States and Mexico and photographing different manifestations
of Santa Muerte for the last few years. I also had been collecting artifacts
related to Santa Muerte and literature and making them available
at the Morbid Anatomy library. It turned out that Tracy
and her identical twin sister Tanya were really fascinated by Santa Muerte
and it turns out, death more generally. This shared enthusiasm,
if you want to call it that, led Tracy and I to co-found in 2014
The Morbid Anatomy Museum in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, New York. In a sense, you could call Santa Muerte the patron saint
of The Morbid Anatomy Museum, and in fact we give pride of place
to this statue in our gift shop. What I would like to do, one of my goals
with The Morbid Anatomy project, more generally
in The Morbid Anatomy Museum, is to get people to question
our own attitudes about death, to show via a preponderance
of examples from other times and places that the way we think about death today
is unique to our own time and place. With longer lifespans,
advances in medicine and hygiene and the outsourcing death
from the home to the funeral parlor, death is for many Americans
further away than ever before, and I think that secretly
many Americans think that death is a problem
that will be solved, and perhaps even in their lifetime. One thing I'd like
the Morbid Anatomy project to be would be a memento mori, but a memento mori
with the kind of secular twist. Rather than avoiding the fires of hell,
something closer to carpe diem. I also hope that
the Morbid Anatomy project has done something
to reclaim the notion of morbid. For after all, if everyone
who's ever lived has died, if I am going to die,
barring some medical miracle, and if death is still one
of the greatest human mysteries, doesn't it seem more morbid -
at least it does to me - not to think about death? After all, it was basically
my own healthy fear of death that led me to do this body of work
that led to the museum now, rather than waiting for a future
that might or might not come. It was precisely
because I so morbidly refused to stop thinking about these things
that I was able to do this kind of work. Perhaps we have something to learn
from other eras and other cultures, and maybe it is
by making friends with death, or the very least making peace with death, that we might paradoxically be able to live the richest,
fullest lives possible. Thank you. (Applause)