Dying cool. Voices and tales not to be afraid was selected as a resident research project at La Escocesa in 2020. During that year, the DU-DA collective conducted a lively research, diverse in terms of languages and critical perspectives around the prevailing discourses on death and the obsolescence of bodies, old bodies, which are no longer useful.

Dying cool does not focus on the science/spirituality dichotomy, but on the search and compilation of counter-hegemonic narratives, complex systems of understanding this apparent life/death duality: death beyond the human, the continuous transformation of the material, the life or death of what is not material, inter-species relations, the questioning of beginnings and ends, other rites and protocols of death management, the question of dignified death, biological obsolescence?

The four members of DU-DA developed this personal and interrelated research through four lines of work:

- Sarai worked from the filmic language the notions of beginning and end of cycle, birth and death, from experiences of childbirth. How does the life that is born relate to the life that dies?

- Sonia worked from biological experimentation in our PUAJ! laboratory in relation to the limits of life and death from microorganisms, accompanying the process of a vegetable fermenting body from activation with kefir to burial in La Escocesa for an underground curing. Are the notions of life and death applicable to other forms of non-human life? Are disgust and what is considered rotten cultural limits?

- Belén used the anthropological gaze and intimate conversation to explore the links between death, love and time in non-human relationships. How can we understand presence and belonging in relation to memory and affection?

- Clara worked through interviews on other imaginaries around death and aging that help us to think about alternative paths. She speculates with the idea that we can propose kinder, more conscious and supportive ways of relating to death and the deterioration of the body. How would we like to grow old? How do we want to die?

In addition, this publication includes texts by Rocío Aranda, Mafe Moscoso, Carolina Meloni, Micaela de la Cruz and Eva Lamote de Grignon, who helped to diversify the gaze in this polyphonic exploration.