Orgasm, La Petite mort, The Little Death

This is a poison, a poison delivering my visual interpretation of sex and death. Sex and death are the nature of being, sex is the gate to birth yet death stands at the end of human life. But is it true that sex and death are a matter of life and reproduction?

Poison, a medium to welcome the ultimate freedom, death. It offers freedom through the desperate longing for the afterlife, while sex as one of the basic human desires offers a more pleasant feeling in the milliseconds of orgasm called ‘the little death’. Both death and sex offer the purgatory effect, death is delivered by deadly poison while sex produces the anti-toxic hormone, reducing the poison in the human body.

Sex might be more mesmerizing than death for the pleasure and satisfaction it offers. But its effect is absolutely mortal and temporal. After a while, the effect is gone, and that’s why humans always exercise sex to fulfill the lack of ‘the little death’ feeling. Only a few are willing to grasp the immortal freedom offered by death because life after death is uncertain, undefined, and mysterious. Its knowledge and understanding are something mankind will always pursue and never achieve.

However, human life always pursuing the ultimate freedom, in between, they try to experience pseudo-freedom, ‘the little death’. – Aji Susanto Anom

Aji Susanto Anom (b.1989) is a photographer based in Solo, Indonesia.
Discover more of his work here