Cenotaph

2025

130 cm x 60 cm x 50 cm

Materials:
metal, velour, upholstery foam, wood

The coordinate system associated with Descartes has found practical application in theatres and opera houses. In their auditoriums, however, there are no seats or rows marked with the number 0, since zero serves as a point of reference rather than as a place that can be occupied.

Cenotaph is a soft tombstone modelled on an auditorium seat. The object refers to the essay The Death of the Viewer, a text whose persuasiveness is shaped by the dramatic concision of its title and the ordered clarity of its three theoretical theses.

1. The viewer has lost the autonomy of the observer, becoming an active consumer and participant whose reactions have been incorporated into the logic of media exchange. Their former, almost “divine” position as a distanced witness has given way to the role of participant, co-author, follower, and tourist.

2. The viewer has ceased to be an independent subject of perception, as algorithmic content filtering has enclosed them within an individual filter bubble. They receive what confirms their expectations, while the experience of encountering otherness increasingly takes the form of a controlled and safe “experience of surprise.”

3. The viewer has become structurally less and less necessary, since contemporary cultural infrastructure is capable of producing and legitimising “empty events” that assume the existence of an audience but function primarily for the purposes of reporting, funding, media presence, and the explanatory texts through which they acquire the appearance of necessity.

To restore the possibility of pure vision, the viewer is invited to remain before the object for several minutes. Sit facing Cenotaph and look at it until the eyes begin to tire. Then close them. The red will disappear first, while the white zero will remain in the field of perception for another moment, opening the possibility of brief contact with emptiness.