At first glance, the act of feeding dead bodies to vultures may seem revolting, macabre and sensationalist. However, the ancient Tibetan ritual of sky burial, the funeral practice in which corpses are placed on a mountaintop and left for the scavengers, is part of the belief in the transmigration of spirits.
For award-winning visual artist Mat Collishaw, this Buddhist ritual emphasising the temporality of life served as the foundation for his dystopian vision of environmental collapse and global catastrophe. His film Sky Burial is not simply a morbid curiosity, but a potent reminder of human contradictions and our toxic relationship with nature.
![](https://news.artsfestival.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Mat-Collishaw-cMat-Collishaw-scaled.jpeg)
Collishaw's haunting imagery in Sky Burial is accompanied by sacred music written by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) and Charles Gounod (1818-1893). The original attempt to provide a fusion of the visual and the sonic will be even more intimately explored at the 2023 Hong Kong Arts Festival 2023 by combining the video projection with a live musical performance using period instruments. This exceptional presentation comes courtesy of Laurence Equilbey and the Paris-based Insula orchestra and accentus. The Insula orchestra produces stage creations every season with non-opera works and "the combination of the sacred music of Fauré and Gounod on original instruments with a visual artist," according to Equilbey, "is completely in line with projects that try to make works from the past resonate in the present".
Equilbey is internationally acknowledged for her demanding yet open-minded approach to music and the arts. By attempting to approximate the sonic experience of the past as closely as possible, she is not trying to project an accurate image, but sees it "as a matter of building bridges between our musical reality and the one of our predecessors". Using instruments from the time of composition restores a unique balance of sound and that process, Equilbey tells FestMag, is similar to re-appropriating an ancient Buddhist ritual through a modern media such as video. "The bridge is different, but it remains a bridge. The fact that the sound is 'original' reinforces this twist between a form of appeasement in the face of death, which clearly exists in the music of Fauré and Gounod."
![](https://news.artsfestival.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Sky-Burial-5_Cropped_c_Mat-Collishaw-2-scaled.jpg)
The sweet release
Fauré saw death as a joyful deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness beyond the grave, rather than a painful experience. As such, he relied on the music and texts of an ancient Parisian rite, one that does not depict the frightening and apocalyptic vision of the Last Judgment.
Gounod started work on Saint Francis of Assisi during his student days and finished it two years before his death. The manuscript was only discovered in 2011 in a nun's cupboard, nearly 200 years after Gounod's death, and Equilbey, with Insula orchestra and accentus, produced the premiere recording in 2016. For Equilbey it is an exceptional preamble to the religious lamentation of Fauré's Requiem, "a monastic drama in a Romanesque style". Two scenes recount St Francis receiving the stigmata of the cross, and the announcement of his impending death. St Francis embodied the spirit of simplicity and poverty, and he had a deep love of nature; concepts and relationships that are also located at the core of Collishaw's film. Both Fauré's and Gounod's music reveal a serene and weightless attitude towards death, and their spiritual reflections, juxtaposed by Collishaw's disturbing imagery, combine to call into question our uneasy relationship with life and death.
Both Fauré's and Gounod's music reveal a serene and weightless attitude towards death, and their spiritual reflections, juxtaposed by Collishaw's perturbed imagery, combine to call into question our uneasy relationship with life and death.
![](https://news.artsfestival.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Sky-Burial-cMat-Collishaw-scaled.jpg)
Sky Burial
Detail: https://www.hk.artsfestival.org/en/programme/s_insula_sky_burial
23 Feb performance sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series