Death Data

Death Data is an investigation of the poetic and aesthetic aspects of the calendric date and the practice of dating.

It is a three year literary project and its primary aim the production of a poetic diary in which questions about historical and present-day givenness and aesthetic singularity are posed against the backdrop of my family history.

Through archival research and field work it will explore the experience of trying to establish the death dates of my maternal grandparents 17 siblings, who were killed during the Holocaust.

It starts out from the present: through the diary-format the project will survey Lublin, Poland, the city where my grandmother grew up, and – if the situation is secure enough – the village of Osova in Western Ukraine, where my grandfather grew up. The project will primarily be based in Berlin.

Death data is theoretically and methodologically grounded in the poetics of Paul Celan and the scholarship that has developed around his conceptualization of the date, to which philosophers such as Jacques Derrida have made significant contributions.

The project’s poetical diary format is inspired by the work of Swedish late 20th century and early 21st century poets such as Göran Sonnevi and Marie Silkeberg.

Its overall importance lies in its development of the concept of the date and the existential and poetical meanings of the practice of dating, thus exposing and testing the tension between artistic creation and aesthetic self-reflection.