Tamam Shud
An artist’s novel by Alex Cecchetti in chapters
In Tamam Shud, a mystery murder artist‘s novel by Alex Cecchetti, the artist and narrator realises he is dead and decides to investigate the causes of his own death. He further learns that someone took great pains to remove all the traces of his existence, but to his own surprise, the artist begins to gather evidence that points toward him being the one responsible for both his death and subsequent oblivion.
I am dead. My body has been found in 2014, somewhere between Los Angeles and Warsaw, dismembered. The labels of the clothes, fingerprints, and the number on the shoes have been carefully unstitched, deleted, washed, bleached, and delivered to oblivion. Nothing can be used for identification. Only clue, in a secret pocket sewn inside my trousers, detectives have recovered a fragile piece of paper torn from the pages of a book, written there, the words «Tamam Shud».
In order to create the Tamam Shud narrative Alex has devised a plan featuring five episodic performances and an exhibition that took place in 2016–2017. The two-year-long art project was curated and edited by The Book Lovers, and produced by the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. In the following pages the reader will find an outline with specific information about each of these events, leading to the publication of the artist‘s novel.
Tamam Shud isn‘t so much a concept as it is a story. Its proposal is structured and open at the same time. A processual work, such as an artist‘s novel, is not defined by a concept, but by whatever happens during the process of its creation, which may very well bring about an end result far removed from the artist‘s expectations. From the beginning Alex wanted to use mystery not only as a literary device, but also to define the relationship with everyone involved in the project. Each instalment, exhibition and performance, release clues that unveil aspects of the narrative like pieces of a puzzle, so that the audience is invited not only to unravel the secrets contained in the story (who the protagonist actually is, who killed him and why, and so on) but also to gradually discover the very mechanisms of the project they are part of.
To die without memories, this is the horror. You know, life is short, but death never ends. And now I have no one to love and no one to hate for the eternity.This is why I have decided to investigate over my own death myself.
