Mobilitas Mori
1984 - Present
Description
Mobilitas Mori old Latin translated to layered meanings, it is a non-standard phrase that would roughly translate to "the mobility of dying". "Remember you are mortal" As Dr. Alijila continues his excavation of the emotional terrain of Exile through the various mediums of boarder passes and tickets of passage through borders. Mobilitas Mori explores the relationship between mobility and mortality, "Mors ultima linea rerum est" – "Death is everything's final limit" (also by Horace, meaning death is the absolute end of earthly existence) Boarding passes and tickets; symbols of modern freedom; are disrupted by black erasures and visceral poppy blood red paint. Information is obscured, identities dissolved, and order fractured. "Pulvis et umbra sumus" – "We are dust and shadow" ( from the poet Horace, reflecting on how fleeting and fragile human life is).
The work reflects on how systems of movement both enable and erase human presence. By merging the language of travel with gestures of rupture and decay, Mobilitas Mori suggests that impermanence is inseparable from motion. Every journey carries its own ending.
Artist Notes
Mobilitas Mori is a mixed-media reflection on movement as both privilege and vulnerability. Constructed from my own boarding passes and tickets thorugh a decade and a half the work uses the language of mobility to show impermanence, erasure, and mortality. The title reconfigures memento mori into a condition of motion: to move is also to decay, to cross is also to disappear. Black painted bands interrupt the surface, obscuring names, numbers, and destinations. These gestures function as acts of censorship and forgetting, echoing how systems of travel reduce individuals to data while simultaneously denying access, visibility, or permanence. A dense, fractured diagonal form cuts through the ordered grid, suggesting rupture, an irreversible moment. This moment has become my daily moment. Red pigment bleeds downward, evoking bodily fragility and the inevitability of loss. Gravity becomes a collaborator, reinforcing time’s irreversible pull. Mobilitas Mori is a tension between freedom and finitude.
Preservation Notes
This piece is fresh and new, acrylics, carbons on linen canvas, collaged tickets and boarding passes with polymer adhesives layered and cohesive currently residing at the Artist's studio in Stockholm Sweden
