Justification

 

Psychoinductive Space II: Velorio is part of the series project "Psychoinductive Spaces", whose objectives converge in the development of a bridge between psychology and art, proposing the use of the artistic work as an inductive therapeutic tool. Thus Velorio is postulated as a work-experiment* that takes the possibility of art as a mean to approach the theme of Death and facilitate the work of the anguish it arouses. The work is based on three theoretical assumptions: the existence of an anguish to death inherent in the human being; The prototypical experience of death and the faculty of ceremonial art.

 

Anguish of death

The anguish of death is an experience that every human being would have to some degree, insofar as it would be linked to the awareness we have of our own existence, that we exist now and in this way because we will not do so. Thus it is recognized that from the origin of cultures human being has tried to deal with this anguish through the generation of cultural products. Today Western culture has tended to a denial of death and neglected this production, leaving individual limited of mechanisms to address this, its conflicting thematic.

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Prototypic experience of death

Studies of the experiences of people who have died clinically and have returned to life have fostered theories about a prototypical experience of the death process, whereby when we die, when we lose consciousness of our environment, we all experience a similar sequence of events , which we could understand as stages. From the original stories it was recognized that the experience of this sequence has vitalising effects, related to a lower anguish in the face of death and a greater awareness of the present condition. Under this idea several authors have shown that the hypnotic production of this prototypical experience has similar effects. However, these methods have practical limitations, such as the difficulty of hypnosis, emphasizing the need for an organic experience, with an experience more from the organism than from the word.

 

Art and death

Of the cultural productions it rescues the artistic disciplines to work on the anguish to the death, because it allows an approximation to the own mortality that is at the same time moderate, producing a first approach from the aesthetic pleasure, as confrontational, because the concrete of the evocation. This double condition would mitigate the original fear of confrontation with the theme. Especially art in its ceremonial function has provided useful metaphors for the construction of sense of death and has been used in initiatory rites of various cultures to actualize death through a material staging, producing from different artistic modalities an immersive experience.

 

In this sense Velorio is postulated as an antecedent in the artistic generation of cultural products that help to deal with the anguish of death through the evocation of the sequence of stages in the process of death.