Looking back at AES+F’s history, a key work for reading Allegoria Sacra is the group’s well-known video work Who Wants to Live Forever, in which Lady Diana Spencer, unconcerned about the car accident or the idea that her body might be discarded on the field of information, continues to move for the television cameras, tries to be seductive. This is not about the Princess of Wales but about culture, for which death is neither a boundary nor the border of life and human existence but a means of continuing action. Once more we hear Mephistopheles:

Past! A stupid word.

Then, why?

Past, and pure nothing, complete monotony!

What use is this eternal creation!

Death dances, joining the dance which runs through the entire
action of Allegoria Sacra. In this dance death is not, and cannot
be, elegiac. It is a parody of itself and a reminder of itself, a self-
sufficient memorial complex. A complex of contemporary culture.
But if one continues the discussion of literary associations then
Gogol’s great poem ‘Dead Souls’ comes to mind and the words
of its hero, doomed to an eternal journey in his sprung carriage,
’…no, I mean the object such as it is, that is to say souls which have
already died’.

Ruth Addison, translation