Artist Vibeke Mascini lets the dead live on a little longer

This story begins with a whale. It washed up on a beach in the Netherlands about ten years ago. Artist Vibeke Mascini went to have a look. What she found surprised her: “It’s a very impressive animal, and it was lying there with big excavators around it and people cutting it.” Those people were from Naturalis’ ‘cutting team’, Mascini heard, they explained to her what would happen to the whale remains.

On the train back home, the artist looked into it himself. The waste disposal facility that the whale’s remains went to is a power plant, she read. Mascini: ‘I found that very fascinating, that electricity can be made from a dead whale. When I got home at night and turned on the hallway light, I thought, wow.’

That feeling of ‘wow’ hasn’t gone away. A few years later, Mascini made a sound system that worked on a whale battery. And after that day on the beach with the whale, she immediately thought: what about dead people?

And now the time has come: in the St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Utrecht, a lamp burns on electricity that partly comes from residual heat from a crematorium. The light shines through a lens that turns it into a beam of light. It falls on one of the columns of the church. Mascini hopes her project will provide comfort: ‘Like the candles burning in the Cathedral’s Lady Chapel.’

On the sunny day when I come to the cathedral, the beam is almost invisible until I walk down the aisle and interrupt the beam. Suddenly I see my shadow on the column. It’s an awe-inspiring idea: Light now falls on me, shining through energy from the dead. Also an incomprehensible idea.

‘Technically, this project is much less complicated than it is ethically,’ Mascini assures me. Using a heat exchanger, energy was extracted from the heat of an incinerator in a crematorium, which is stored in two large batteries, the type normally found in Teslas. Mascini worked with the crematorium and funeral directors to get permission from the next of kin.

I myself would certainly give permission, to be able to continue living as electricity and as light for a while. In 2007 I had an experience similar to it. Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer had covered an exhibition space with flashing lights. Those lamps, old-fashioned bulbs, took over the rhythm of the heartbeats of exhibition visitors via sensors.

I also let my heartbeat through the installation Pulse Room ‘take over’ and saw how it gently knocked along in the garland of flickering lights of the visitors who preceded me. Lozano-Hemmer was inspired by the Mexican film macaroon (1960), in which human lives are depicted as burning candles.

It is not the first time that Mascini has focused on death in her art: ‘It has to do with my interest in metamorphosis and transformation.’ For example, since 2017 she has been campaigning for the word ‘death rattle’, which had disappeared from the Dutch dictionary. Now she has good news: ‘In the new edition that was published last week, ‘death rattle’ is back. I’ll be buying a copy soon.’