Death, life, and birth belong together!

Open-air exhibition “Threshold Transitions of Life” at Alanus University.

Luise Paulsen is a trained undertaker and is studying in the “Philosophy, Arts and Social Innovation”* degree program at Alanus University. In the interview, she explains how her exhibition “Threshold Transitions of Life” engages with the existential themes of death, life, and birth. Anyone who is curious can visit the exhibition on the Campus II – Villestraße grounds in Alfter until Easter.

You come from a family of undertakers and trained as an undertaker yourself. What led you to study “Philosophy, Arts and Social Innovation” at Alanus University afterward?

It was clear to me that after my training, I needed a degree program for my personal development. My path to Alanus University and this degree program was a journey with many individual stages. When I heard about the program, I was thrilled: This is IT! – “Philosophy, Arts and Social Innovation” – the degree program I had dreamed of, longed for, and searched for!

What should change in our society in the way we deal with the topics of death, life, and birth?

I experience it as our time dividing life into sections that are increasingly less perceived as ultimately belonging to one life; this alienates people ever more deeply from themselves. Joy and strength in life lie in bringing things together and in doing things oneself independently. In my social project, which is part of my exhibition, I therefore developed the concept for the “House in the Circle of Threshold Transitions of Life.”

Your degree program includes three practical projects: a social, an artistic, and a philosophical one. In your projects, you explore the themes of death, life, and birth from these three perspectives. How exactly did you put this into practice?

In all three areas, the question “Is it beneficial for people to view the thresholds of death and birth together?” is central. Because of this inner kinship, the projects together form a whole, which is why I present all three projects together as part of my exhibition.

In the philosophy project, I then developed further questions in pairs on the topics of death and birth. One pair of questions is, for example: “What significance does death have for my life? What significance does birth have for my life?” These questions could be answered on specially designed cards by the circle of people connected with the Ambulant Hospice Service e. V. for Bornheim and Alfter, the Birth House Bonn – Doula e. V. (where I completed internships in each case), and Alanus University. The aim was to exhibit the answers together so that the diversity of the cards would create a unifying and multifaceted space for reflection in which the individual person can find inspiration.

Based on my practical experience, I asked myself: If I were to found a birth, dying, and funeral home or association, what would it look like? Would it not correspond to life, and would it not support the daily work that is becoming ever more structurally complex, if there were one house that was a birth, dying, and funeral home with a kindergarten, assisted living / retirement home, and neighboring apartments? To this end, I developed a concept in my social project for a “House in the Circle of Threshold Transitions of Life.”

In my art project, I transformed my experiences, thoughts, and dreams into a sculpture: from a three-ton oak trunk, a “Gate of the Threshold Transitions of Life” was created, asking: Do we pass through the same gate when being born and when dying – only each time from the other side?

Why do you know so much about apple varieties? What role do they play in your project?

In the context of the question of how to display the question-and-answer cards from the philosophy project, the idea arose to plant apple trees.

Alongside the central project question, there are other threads that consistently run through the different levels of all three projects. One of these threads is the five-pointed star – which lives both in the apple tree and in us humans: in the apple, the five-pointed star becomes visible, for example, in the horizontally cut core. Symbolically representing the different people who took part in the philosophy project, I planted five different varieties: young and old, regional and supraregional.

While searching for the suitable five young apple trees, I had the idea of planting them counterclockwise in a pentagon according to their ripening time. In this way, alongside the spatial threshold experience created, among other things, by entering the pentagon, I was also able to incorporate time. The sense of time at the threshold transitions of life is something special: do the clocks turn backward here?

What comes next for you? Are there plans, for example, to turn your ‘Birth-Life-Death House’ into reality?

After completing my studies, I would like to continue my education and work at the threshold of birth or death, so I do not have any concrete plans to build this house.

The project “Threshold Transitions of Life” was funded by the Friends’ Association of Alanus University e. V.

[*Until the fall semester of 2021, the degree program “Philosophy, Arts and Social Innovation” was titled “Philosophy, Arts and Social Entrepreneurship” (abbreviated: Ph.A.S.E.).]

Photo: © Lisa-Marie Tilg