Immortality Was a Mistake

In a time marked by continuous endings and uncertain beginnings, this project does not seek stability, but moves through the unstable terrain where endings haven’t fully ended and beginnings remain unresolved. I am not asking how we survive, but how we transform. How can we learn to die within a world that no longer holds us, and craft the conditions to be reborn into another? What forms of intelligence might guide us beyond crisis, toward emergent modes of existence? I approach this question not with an answer, but through a form of listening, deep, reciprocal, and radical. A listening that allows us to temporarily disarm the mental infrastructures that keep us fixed, and instead attune to alternative possibilities for (collective) becoming. This listening is not passive; it is morphological, sensorial, and transformative. The work materializes within the mutable landscape of the Wadden Sea, a shifting liminal zone between land and water. Here, silence is not the absence of sound but a mesh of submerged signals, subtle shifts, and tidal rhythms that call to be heard. The tides continuously erase and redraw the coastline, staging a natural choreography of disappearance and return, collapse and regeneration. This setting informs not only the aesthetic, but the very architecture of the work. The installation gestures toward an understanding of transformation where, as the title suggests, "Immortality Was a Mistake", not a denial of death, but a refusal of the impulse to transcend it. The jellyfish, often misnamed as immortal, does not escape the end, it folds into it, rewinds its form, and begins again. In this gesture, survival is no longer a conquest, but a quiet art of becoming otherwise. At the conceptual core of the project lies the biological process of transdifferentiation, a rare regenerative ability embodied by Turritopsis dohrnii. In response to environmental stress, this organism can reverse its life cycle, returning from a mature medusa state to a polyp. It does so by silencing its genes and reprogramming its cellular identity. This form of intelligence disrupts the linear narratives of life and death, proposing instead a cyclical logic of undoing and becoming anew. Retreat is not failure, but adaptation, a strategic surrender that allows for reinvention.