Photosynthesizing Dead in Warehouse

Wooden boxes topped with glass cases sit in an empty house that has stood vacant for a long time. The situation seems at once like an isolated art museum, a resource-depleted near future, and a private house under interior construction. Scenes of fruits decaying in the boxes are interspersed with correspondence from a researcher studying the kusōzu, Buddhist paintings that depict nine stages of a decaying corpse and are associated with the practice of realizing impermanence.
Photosynthesizing Dead in Warehouse is a neo-kusōzu in a sense, with its documentation of decay and questions about death. The narration consists of fragments of emails, intertwined with various excerpts from the study of the kusōzu, and contemplates the reason for our symbolic experience of death – or our inability thereof. This work is an essay film about looking at things as they are, making up stories in an attempt to make sense of them, and, as we follow these two axes that cast shadows on each other, what binds and liberates us.