Boltanski: Well, I'd say that there are very few subjects in art, and these are looking for God, asking questions about death and love and sex. I'm working around the idea of vanitas, a huge subject in art. You are somebody, but if I kill you, you will become an awful body in a bloody sheet, an object. I find that idea very strange and unclear and it's a question I often think about. I also think that our relationship with death and dying these days is not good at all. Fifty years ago one's grandfather, say, would die at home, and the grandchild would see the grandfather's dead face. The fact of dying was inside the fact of living. Now we've become ashamed of dying, we want to forget that we're going to die. Dying has become an accident. But I think it's important to speak about it as it's the only thing we can really be sure of. We are all going to die. We also have a problem with the fact of killing. For example, I eat meat but I would never dream of killing an animal. But I think if we eat meat, we have to accept that being alive means that we kill things around us. But we forget these basic aspects of our humanity.

Garb: But there's a difference between speaking about death as one of the grand themes of life, and confronting one's own death. Is making art about death yet another defence against the question of your own mortality?

Boltanski: I'm sure of it. When I told you at the beginning of the interview that I was 'dead' already, it was to do with avoiding death. If you are already dead then you don't have to die.

Christian Boltanski & Tamar Garb, 'Interview' in Christian Boltanski (Phaedon, 1997)