Kassiewijle

Podcast series, live events

Death is nothing and everything at once

From an early age, artist and funerary specialist Babs Bakels has been immensely fascinated with death. Radio host Laura Stek, who prefers to ignore her mortality, became intrigued by Babs: why would someone constantly surround themselves with decay and finiteness? 

Together, Laura and Babs explore how we tend to deal with death in six podcast episodes, from the last breath to the afterlife, whilst in the midst of a pandemic. They visit a “rather alive funeral”, go through a death meditation, enter a dissection room, and speak with death rattle experts. 

Meanwhile, we learn more and more about Babs’s morbid fascination. “I’m lighthearted about it, but I actually struggle daily with my fear of death. I deal with it by looking directly into the monster’s mouth.”

The podcast

As a little girl, Babs Bakels used to play in graveyards and bury small animals in her grandmother’s campsite. This unusual fascination never left her since. Her house is full of skulls, stuffed animals, and art history books about death.

As a student she worked in a funeral home; as a curator she was one of the founders of the Uitvaartmuseum Tot Zover (the Dutch Funeral Museum So Far). Babs’s mission is to bring death closer to us again.

Over the past century, we have almost completely removed the Grim Reaper from public life. Cemeteries are located outside the city; due to the secularisation of society the focus has shifted to worldly life, instead of the heavenly, and the funeral industry has largely rid people of their mortuary rituals. Language has also considerably evolved: we speak of “passing away”, of “loss”, of “departing”. Can Babs teach us anything about our complex relationship with death? Has the pandemic changed that?

Listen to the episodes here: https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/kassiewijle.html

Art installation

Kassiewijle also offers the opportunity to test a unique death experience in the audio installation “This body that once was you”, an artwork by Babs Bakels and Vibeke Mascini. 

Seated in a field of nebulized human bone dust, the participant ‘dies’ in preparation for the inevitable end. Enny Das, Professor of Communication and Influencing at Radboud University, investigates the effects of the artwork by subjecting participants to psychological tests. The research results are shared in a short extra episode of the podcast.