Eat Love Die

3 cherry wood frames, 25 x 19 x 5 cm, ultrachrome print on Hahnemühle photo rag, LCD screen with color film on loop, 6:51 “, 8 cherry stalks, Hahnemühle photo rag

The triptych Eat Love Die presents multiple representations of the cherry. The first part is a black-and-white photograph of eight cherries. The second is a video recording of a performance in which a red-lipsticked mouth eats all eight cherries. The pit is spat toward the viewer. The stem is tied into a lemniscate using only the tongue, the ∞ symbol of infinity. Finally, all eight stems are neatly arranged on paper. The triptych is framed in three cherry wood frames and hangs at mouth height.

Eat Love Die is about what life is: eating, loving and dying, with the pit as the promise of a new beginning. The work grew from Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence: the idea that time repeats in an infinite loop and that the exact same events, including every detail of your life, will unfold again and again. It is a thought experiment in which Nietzsche asks: Would you want to live this life, with everything that happens in it, infinitely many times over?

Roos van Geffen: “I wanted to make something in the here and now, the sensual, I wanted to feel alive. I made it in the year after my father died. The cherry as a (feminine) symbol of life, of sex and eternal recurrence. Tying a cherry stem into a knot using only your tongue is a reference to a scene in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, in which a woman does the same. Eating cherries always catapults me back to my childhood in the Betuwe, where every summer began with picking cherries from our cherry trees. I practised tying a cherry stem endlessly. In the video I perform this action eight times in a row, filmed in a single take. Through repetition it becomes absurd, a little obscene and also funny. At the same time I see it as a kind of ritual, to ward off death.”

Photos: Gert Jan van Rooij