“The Sublime Grandeur of Inconsequential Death” is an interactive, inflatable anti-monument. The installation solicits a participant, whose fall and rise triggers the inflation and deflation of the monument; neither can rise without the fall of the other. This co-dependent and co-constituted relationship frames monumentality and performances of death as nationalist propaganda. The dramatics of the action—both human and monumental—suggest a sublime liberation, all the while actively underscoring ideas of citizenship and nation building that uphold and perpetuate militaristic violence. This work asks participants to experience this tension, somatically, via embodied participation. 

This work, and the interaction that powers it, contributes to a larger commentary on choreographies of falling and dying, which is communicated to audiences through a movement score for animating death. This score is both reflective (it defines the choreographic parameters of the heroic death) and generative (it allows for expressive variation in its myriad interpretations). The score offers a poetic memorial for the seemingly ephemeral experience of falling, and its reverberations beyond the confines of the installation.