Daniele Costa - Seeing Beyond Fading

Seeing Beyond Fading is a project comprising a filmic work; a video installation, and a book. It explores the liminal territory of the end of life, transforming heat from a biological trace of existence into pure vision. Using thermal cameras, Daniele Costa captures what is invisible to the naked eye the transfer of heat between bodies, the proximity between patients, families, and healthcare staff, and the slow dissipation of thermal energy that accompanies the transition toward rigor mortis. The title plays with the grammar of film editing: while in cinema a 'fade' marks the appearance or disappearance of an image, here thermal technology allows one to see beyond the fading: making abstraction tangible. Indeed, the thermal image acts as a process of de-identification: the body loses its somatic features to become a landscape and a luminous spectrum that consumes itself until it merges with the surrounding void. The book itself becomes a body: a sensitive skin that retains light and heat. Seeing Beyond Fading demonstrates how in this passage between the visible and the invisible, matter is transformed: through an eternalistic perspective, death ceases to be annihilation or an end, converting itself instead into a continuum.