SwanSong (Woolf)

Virginia Woolf (March 28, 1941)

River Ouse, Sussex

"The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air." 

(The Waves, 182)

Invisible continuity is intrinsic to water. This continuity exceeds us even while being the biggest part of us. It's this continuity that makes our effect on water an effect on us. That is to say: "I am the Thames!" or "The Thames is me!" 

 (Roni Horn. Still Water. Plate 7)

SwanSong (Ader)

Bas Jan Ader (April 18, 1976)
150 km of the west coast of Ireland

Swan Song (Thomson)

Tom Thomson (July 8, 1917)
Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park

SwanSong (Lombardi)

Mark Lombardi (March 22, 2000)
Williamsburg, NYC

http://benfry.com/exd09/

Swan Songs (Lennon)

John Lennon (December 8, 1980)
The Dakota, NYC

Swan Songs (Pasolini)

Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 2, 1975)
Ostia, Italy

"So it's absolutely necessary to die, because till we're alive we are lacking of sense, and the language of our life (with which we express ourself, and to which we attach the maximum importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibility, a research of relations and meanings without solution of continuity. Death makes an instantaneous montage of our life: that is, it chooses ones really significant moments (and not more by now modifiable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments), and it puts them in succession, making of our never ending, instable and unsure present and so linguistically not describable, a clear, stable, sure past, and so linguistically describable (just in the ambit of a General Semiology). Only thanks to death, our life is used by us to express ourself."

(Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, Garzanti, Milan)

Biography / Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini

SwanSong (Genet)

Jean Genet (le 15 avril 1986)

chambre 205, Jacks’Hôtel,  Paris

His sudden death came whilst he was still proofreading his last novel, "Prisoner of Love", which was published posthumously the same year.

SwanSong (Gaudí)

Antoni Gaudí (June 7, 1926)
Gran Via, Barcelona