It Takes Energy to Die

It Takes Energy to Die is an essay by Kirsty Bell on Help the Dead by Every Ocean Hughes. Part concert, part theatre, Help the Dead draws inspiration from a series of workshops the artist attended, where Ocean Hughes was learning how to be a death doula, to care for dead bodies and to perform home funerals. Weaving together song, script, movement, and audience participation, performers Colin Self and Geo Wyeth stage possibilities of mutual aid and self-determination.

Every Ocean Hughes’ (formerly known as Emily Roysdon; b. 1977, Easton, MD; lives and works between Easton and Stockholm) current series of works are connected by the artist’s interest in transitions, thresholds, kinship, legacy, and queer life.

Help the Dead was commissioned by Volt and premiered in Bergen in 2019. It has later been shown at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2019), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2022) and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (2023).

Kirsty Bell is a writer and art critic living in Berlin. She has published widely in magazines and journals including Tate Etc. and Art in America, and was a contributing editor of frieze from 2011–2021. She was awarded a Warhol Foundation Grant for her book The Artist’s House, and her essays have appeared in over seventy exhibition catalogues for major international museums and institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Tate, UK. Her latest book The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022), addresses history, subjectivity and cityscape. Bell has lectured widely in European institutions, and has been an advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, since 2015.