Through French windows, the creative, gently lit gallery-like rooms of Junimond in Berlin-Friedrichshain, where openness replaces solemn formality, and a painted casket sits not hidden, but held with care and intention, emerge the very essence of our collaboration.
Leo Ritz and Hendrik Thiele found no conventional funeral home, but a safe space for the souls. Rooted in transparency and attuned to individual needs, the team empowers each bereaved soul to shape and take part in the farewell on their own terms. Whether through ritual, design, or silence, they invite people closer to death, not to diminish the pain of loss, but to let it be held with dignity, respect, and love. Leo, with her decade of caregiving experience and intuitive empathy, and Hendrik, a designer turned empathy-coach, approach death not as an endpoint, but as a profound moment that deserves clarity, aesthetic care, and above all, human dignity.
Our project "Beyond the end", born from this tender philosophy, aims to make visible what too often stays unseen. As well as it grows out of that ethos. Death is the great equaliser: indifferent to nationality, language, gender, demanding our attention even as we shy from it. It is a reality we all share, and yet we so often hide it away, unspoken and uneasy. Together with Junimond, we have offered a small, deliberate gesture toward death-awareness: not to shock, mock, or trivialise, but to gently open a door, to hold space for what is real and inevitable, creating something tangible to approach what feels unreachable, opening a door to conversations that already exist in whispers but deserve to be heard.
By meticulously responding and interacting a palpable moment - an image, an installation, a conversation, this is a translation of abstract weight into something that could be faced. In the same spirit as Junimond’s offer to let the bereaved participate in washing, dressing, or preparing a loved one in any form suitable for them at the moment. Beyond the end is an invitation to step closer: a moment of recognition, of respectful acknowledgement. Similarly, to paint a coffin as an act of love, the project and viewers' gesture are about proximity: about daring to look, touch, and speak where silence used to rule.
Every detail in our collaboration has been chosen with the utmost care: with the warmth of Junimond’s empathetic language, their commitment to individual choice, their rejection of pressuring scripts; with a spirit that honours grief as human, and grief-stricken as needing space, clarity, and compassion.
This project and I, Elizaveta Bogachova, do not seek to exploit or sensationalise. Instead, join Junimond in leaning toward the unspoken, offering a gentle light. Because when we know even ever so slightly what lies behind that door, the silence grows softer, the dialogue more possible. For the cultivation of death awareness, we learn not only how to die, but also how to live with greater honesty and tenderness.
In the words of David Bowie, which adorn Junimond’s home:
“I don't know where I'm going from here,
but I promise it won't be boring.”
but I promise it won't be boring.”
Poetics of death.
