ABSTRACT
With foundations in the mausoleum and reliquary, the museum and death have long kept company. However, the museum also has its etymological roots in the Greek, mouseion meaning “seat of the muses”: circumscribing the museum as a place of contemplation. This chapter discusses audience experiences of Life before Death, a traveling, temporary exhibition of photographic portraits displayed during 2008 at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road, London. The exhibition has an afterlife both sanctioned and unsanctioned. On the Wellcome Collection website there are installation shots, photographs and interviews with journalist Beate Lakotta and the veteran photographer Walter Schels, whose collaboration generated the exhibition. Creative variations of the exhibitions that include additional soundtracks and are usually presented without the interview text panels come and go on YouTube raising issues to which I will return. The exhibition is the result of combined interviews and photographs of 24 terminally ill residents in North German hospices. The ensuing photographs and interview text panels were according to gallery information, a chance to give the participants “one more opportunity to be heard.”1 The portraits were cross-generational: the opportunity to be heard for the youngest sitters was mediated by parents with text panels written in collaboration with Lakotta.
