Posthumous Portraits in Motion: Experimental Animation, Metamorphosis and Reflections on Mortality

Abstract

This article details an oil paint-on-glass animation depicting posthumous portraits of unclaimed deceased from a Johannesburg mortuary in South Africa. The creative project engages with Western traditions of posthumous, focusing on the iconography of the corpse. The author explores how these traditions are approached through the moving image, metamorphosis and experimental animation processes. The animation uses metamorphosis not just as a symbolic strategy to serve the idea of transformation – but also as a self-referential engagement with animation’s contradictory life-giving and destructive traits. The article and the creative project it illuminates present a critical awareness of the ethical concerns associated with representing the dead and the cultural and historical traditions from which this subject emerges.