Iana Boukova

Fears leading to insanity (excerpt), 2017 - 2020

There are topics where it is a symptom the very fact that they are called "current". Victorians are said to have talked about death all the time, but never about sex. Like Victorians with a reverse sign, we constantly talk about sex, never about death.
"Fears leading to insanity" is a poetic project based on "found text” and exploring the inability of the modern person to approach the subject of their mortality. From the shamanic jargon of medicine through the mourning kitsch to the inexhaustible pataphysics of the popular media, language proves to be both powerless and aggressive, macabrely comical in every attempt to utter the fact of dying. Madness takes the place of metaphysics.
"I don't need to say anything. I'm just showing" says Benjamin.
The fragments used have been collected by the Web in recent years from a variety of sources: stories in the news, forensic reports, posts in groups and discussion forums, advertisements of funeral homes, dictionary entries, Google search results etc. The text has not been changed, only in some places the lines are cut to resemble verse form. Original spelling is preserved. / Iana Boukova, April 2020

*texts - availabe in Bulgarian only
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