Moscas (Flies)

Fly Cake

Fly Cakes and the Black Sunlight

My artistic research focuses on dead animals, their transformation and their meaning in the context of art. Inspired by Damien Hirst’s Black Sun — a monumental work made of dried flies — my photography and video installations explore the tension between life and decay, aesthetics and repulsion.

For me, flies are not only a symbol of transience but also of the cyclical processes of life and death. My work gives rise to “fly cakes” (Fliegenkuchen): condensed organic structures that recall fossil relics but also celebrate the grim materiality of decomposition. The textures, colours and almost painterly arrangement of the dead insects question the traditional notion of beauty and play with the boundary between fascination and disgust.

My photography and video installations capture these macabre landscapes in extreme close-up, where each fly becomes part of a larger organism. Light and shadow model the surfaces of the “fly cakes”, turning them into a kind of cosmic mass — like Hirst’s Black Sun — that draws every gaze towards it like a black hole.

This work is a reflection on the inevitable: death as the ultimate metamorphosis — raw, brutal, and yet of an unsettling beauty.