AIN GORDON

Work In Progress. Contact: gordon@pupcs.org

 

Premiere at New York Live Arts 2026/27 as part of their Live Feed Commission initiative, a Creative Capital awardee, and a Simons Foundation grantee to support research engagement with astrophysicist Dr. Amy Secunda.

  

“After the death of each of my parents, their ashes arrived in a plastic bag, contained in a cardboard box, held in a plastic box, slid into a polyester pouch, ALL in a synthetic tote bag emblazoned with an eternal flame. Eternal like these non-recyclable containers - or eternal like maybe grief? 

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Victorians propped up dressed corpses for ‘one last portrait’ and made jewelry from their hair (my mother owned a Victorian hair brooch my dad bought at a flea market, I wear it in their memory, but who did it originally memorialize?).

 

My ancestral Ashkenazi’s used to ‘rend’ their garments when someone died, but in recent funerals I’ve been handed some black ribbon, already cut, and a safety pin.

 

One by one I took my parents ashes to the ocean. I already knew ashes don’t ‘scatter,’ they’re heavy, and they clump and stick. Why use language to portray death as an act of ‘passing away’ or scattering – as opposed to grief maybe calcifying into something you must carry? But also, why pretend we don’t want to carry something even if it’s only a brooch or ribbon or memory or DNA or an eternal flame printed on a non- compostable bag? Via research into 20th century diminishment of death and dying ritual (motorized hearses erase procession, Coco Channel dilutes widow’s weeds with ‘the little black dress’) CONDOLENCE asks who contemporary death and dying practices actually comfort and how can we mourn in modernity?”