AES+F

In 1998, the art collective AES+F launched the project “Who Wants to Live Forever.” This work aims to expose the insatiable appetite of contemporary media for disseminating scandalous information masquerading as news. It serves as an explicit reference to the tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. Against a stark white backdrop, a light-haired young woman poses as an explicit doppelgänger of the late princess. She is seated in the passenger seat of a Mercedes-Benz S280—the same make and model of the car in which the Princess expired during a fatal crash. The soundtrack features music from the band Queen.

"Who Wants to Live Forever" critiques the relentless and cynical culture of paparazzi, whose quest for exclusive photographs knows no bounds. This insatiable pursuit of fame is intricately linked to the circumstances surrounding Princess Diana's untimely demise. In the video, the young woman poses as if she is being photographed for a glossy magazine cover. The visible injuries found on Diana’s corpse, such as the blood dripping from her nose and smeared across her chest, or daintily descending from her lips were faithfully reproduced according to a detailed police report garnered from the internet.

For AES+F, the physical death of Princess Diana did not announce the demise of her media image — beloved as she was by the people and the press during her lifetime — but rather its canonization. On a biographical note, Who Wants to Live Forever was inspired by the mass hysteria displayed by the British people on the occasion of Diana’s death, a delirium the artists witnessed directly given that they arrived in London on the day of the Princess’s tragic passing and departed on the day of her funeral. This devotional frenzy resembled the medieval revelation of a new saint, bringing with it all the attendant, morbid interest in a victim’s wounds, presented as evidence of the purity of her sacrifice.