The Final Month

The Final Month is a video installation with ten screens, built into a wall. On each screen the same hand appears, life size, against a dark background and arranged in chronological order. The images are short loops, choreographies of a life slowly fading. By isolating the actions and presenting the images at eye level and life size, the passing of time and the slowing of movement become physically tangible.

Roos van Geffen: “The Final Month originated during the final stage of my father’s life. Every day I visited him I filmed his hands, up to and including the day after his death, as an attempt to relate to his approaching death. At the same time I was driven by curiousity: what disappears when a person dies? How does a hand change, the muscles, tendons, veins and skin in the final days? Like a flower that withers, I observed his hands, circling around the question of what life is. But a year later, when I watched the more than one hundred recordings, I realised that a deeper desire lay beneath it: the desire for real closeness and love.”

The Final Month makes visible what is usually avoided or outsourced. In doing so, it touches on broader questions around care, mortality and how we relate to vulnerability, both individually and collectively. The work stands in a tradition of deathbed scenes and death portraits, from the old masters to more intimate, modern approaches to dying. Where these images often capture the moment of death or the representation of the deceased, The Final Month focuses on the process itself: the slow fading that comes before it. By focusing on the hand, the viewer’s attention shifts to the body as the place where life literally withdraws.