On Death and Immortality / 2025

Death is not an end, but a boundary — a threshold that figures of culture, science, and art ceaselessly strive to overcome. Humanity seeks ways to postpone the inevitable and actively develops alternative formats of existence beyond time: from the myth of life after death — to technologies of eternal preservation, from ritual — to the digital trace, from the cemetery — to the cloud archive. In this, we realize an innate need to leave something behind.

Exploring art, I notice that almost every work enters into dialogue with death, with the space of oblivion and memory. We search for immortality and consolation in works of art — in galleries, museums, literature, music, theater, and cinema. There we also witness the death of outdated concepts, which leads to our own personal rebirth and transition into new, more conscious stages. Thus, within a single lifetime, we are capable of living several lives, each unlike the other.

The irony lies in the fact that humanity, in its millennia-long history, resembles a warrior with his head cut off: forgetting everything, yet attempting to speak of the same things again and again — each time in a new context. Many great minds agree that humanity has not fundamentally changed over the past few thousand years. Society still tends to reject those who disrupt the familiar order or attempt to bring radically new ideas. It is therefore not inconceivable that, were Jesus to return to Earth, he would once again be crucified.

Immortality is less a question of matter than of perspective. How many people will remember you? How many times will your thought be quoted in a context to which you no longer belong? We live in an era of “paradoxical immortality” — when disappearance itself becomes a form of presence. The more you slip away, the more significant you become. Perhaps the only form of immortality available to us lies precisely in the ability to leave this world with quality.