It was to be a dance of death. In the early summer of the Corona years, 2021, Rosa Jaisli decided to embark on a graphic cycle devoted to the theme. Her fascination with the subject is profound and draws on two traditions at once: on the one hand the European dance-of-death motif, and on the other the cult of the dead in Mexico, with its very particular form.
These two lines of reception already show that Jaisli is less interested in the moralizing aspect of the theme, which spread through Europe from the late fourteenth century onward and classically depicts secular or clerical figures of every social rank — from pope to peasant — dancing in a round with a skeleton as personified death. The message is that death comes for everyone without distinction. The dance of death, however, long ago emancipated itself from this canonical representation and has remained present in art through all periods up to the present. As Matthias Buschle has argued, a dance of death is in principle an artwork open to interpretation. It leaves room for new readings, opens spaces for contemporary history, and can therefore always be adapted anew. Alongside the fundamental admonition not to forget death in one’s own life, satirical and playful elements often join these depictions, also to break the monstrosity of death and the associated loss.
In Mexican culture the relationship to death is more positive because the cult of the dead incorporates cultural elements from the precolonial period, before Christianization by the Spanish conquerors. In the Aztec imagination, the dead remained respected members of society, an idea that still carries weight today. Once a year, on 1 and 2 November, the dead visit their relatives and are cared for and celebrated as befits a proper — joyful — family festival. They receive a kind of offering table, the “ofrenda”, among whose typical furnishings are the well-known sugar skulls. For Europeans they may be a memento mori, but in Mexico they symbolize the bond with the dead. “In Europe the skeleton is a symbol of death; in Mexico, of life beyond death.” Awareness of this particular relation to the dead as part of Mexican national identity became especially strong in the late nineteenth century, not least through the newspaper illustrator José Guadalupe Posada Aguilar. His “calaveras”, the “little dead”, are humorous caricatures with skeletons. The most famous of them is “La Catrina”, a skeletal lady with a large flowered hat. For Rosa Jaisli, who comes from Chile, this figure also plays an important role, because for the artist death — in Spanish la muerte — is always female.
Rosa Jaisli has made the impulses and sources of inspiration for this theme explicit: alongside Posada’s illustrations, there was the exhibition Lebende Tote (1986) on the cult of the dead in Mexico at the Übersee-Museum in Bremen, which she visited and which deeply impressed her. On the European side she also refers to Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal (1957) and Peter Greenaway’s film project on the famous Basel Dance of Death. Among the many European dances of death, it is above all the cycle completed in 1731 in the Holy Sepulchre Chapel of Michelsberg Monastery in Bamberg that she particularly admires: a baroque stucco ceiling full of lightness, in which a host of delicate skeletons dynamically determine the scene. In one corner appears death blowing soap bubbles, a symbol of transience and at the same time a toy. This figure had already inspired an earlier work by Rosa Jaisli and now also marks the beginning of the present cycle. It is an amiable death.
How has Rosa Jaisli translated all these impressions into her own project? With twelve sheets of parchment paper measuring 200 by 200 centimeters, on which death appears as a silhouette, she connects to her previous paper works. New in her oeuvre is the principle of collage: for the first time she has glued on the still-living figures and the various attributes in black tissue paper. Despite the stark black-and-white contrast, the overall impression remains light because the white of the supporting paper and the ghostly figures of the bone people dominate the surface. The structure of all sheets is the same. In the upper part there are two skeletons aligned along the central axis, whose mirrored arrangement means that the two bony beings seem to communicate more with each other than with their potential dance partners. Those partners, in turn, are arranged in a frieze in the lower part of the sheets, occupied with themselves and scarcely aware of death.
The basis of the black collaged figures often consists of stencils that arose partly from the artist’s imagination and partly from images suggested by the media. This has several effects. First, because of their animated poses, the figures also appear extraordinarily lively as silhouettes. Second, the stencil permits repetition and thereby emphasizes simplification and seriality. Third, the viewer is confronted with images that feel familiar, even if they may only be recognized at second glance. The motifs chosen by Rosa Jaisli range from African prehistory to the twenty-first century and often possess iconic status. The pictorial elements negotiate illness, warlike violence from the ancient Greeks to today, the passing of time, fear in the face of death, but also beauty, friendship, affection, and resurrection. Although the attributes assigned to the skeletons each relate in content to the scenes in the lower register, there is no continuous narrative here. Instead, the loosely arranged motifs create a kind of associative space of thought. In this way a universal dance of death has emerged — highly topical and contemporary, yet historically grounded.
The threats depicted are real. They remind us that human beings have always challenged death and at the same time always feared it. The personified deaths that appear in this cycle do not look threatening, however, but rather cheerful and human. As if Rosa Jaisli were saying: we have to come to terms with them anyway. And in the end, who knows, perhaps it is not death itself, but the dead, who are meeting us here.
Posada. Viva la muerte. Préface de Jean-Jacques Lévêque (Les Maîtres du dessin satirique 4), Paris 1979; Lebende Tote. Totenkult in Mexiko, exh. cat. Übersee-Museum Bremen, Frankfurt a. M. 1986; Uli Wunderlich, Elfi Jemiller: Der Bamberger Totentanz. Rund um den Leichnam im Heiligen Grab des Klosters Michelsberg, Regensburg 2009; Peter Greenaway: The Dance of Death / Der Tanz mit dem Tod. Ein Basler Totentanz, Basel 2013