IN DEATH & FICTION
INSTALLATION, 2013
CREATOR - LOUISE MANIFOLD (TEXT & NARRATION: KEVIN BARRY (IE)
In Death & Fiction is a sixteen millimetre film installation with sound that was developed collaboratively with fiction writer Kevin Barry. The work tells the story of a man suffering from Cotard’s delusion, a rare illness whereby a living person holds the belief that he or she is dead, decayed or immortal. It is common for the subject to feel a sensation of the absence of both body parts and personal recognition, alongside an inability to believe that they are alive.
Louise has been collecting personal accounts from the last two centuries of people’s experiences of Cotard’s delusion. Many describe a language of surreal physical symptoms, whereby internal anxiety is externalised. This constructed reality in psychosomatic experiences is what makes up Samuel Beckett’s novella, The Calmative. It describes the subject’s need to tell a story in order to calm his belief that he is dead. The story then enacts a journey for the author.
Louise drew upon the illness and the story to recreate a similar journey, inviting Kevin to write and narrate a fictional monologue of a man suffering from Cotard’s delusion. Presented as a narrative journey through decayed urban landscapes, In Death & Fiction questions the experience of life beyond death as a fiction. It examines how we imagine existence beyond death collectively, and the actuality of its experience as delusion.
BIO:
Born in County Galway, Louise studied at Central Saint Martins in London and the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology in Ireland. She has exhibited extensively throughout Ireland, and internationally at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York; Proximal Distances in Chicago; Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm; Red House Arts Centre in Syracuse, New York; Candid Arts Centre in London; and 411 Galleries in Shanghai, China. She was awarded residencies with the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in 2008; SÍM in Iceland in 2008; the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York in 2010/11; Botin Foundation in Spain 2013 and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin in 2014/15. Louise has been the recipient of awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Culture Ireland, Galway City Council, Údarás na Gaeltachta and Galway County Council. In 2009, she was one of the four artists shortlisted for the Allied Irish Bank Art Prize.