The Box is a major cultural and heritage attraction and archive, which opened in Plymouth’s city centre in September 2020. Its collection, formally the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA), is the regional film archive for the South West of England, comprising the combined programme libraries of Westward Television and Television South West (TSW). It also includes a significant number of donated film collections dating back to the early 1890s.
This film is part of Free
Lenkiewicz and the Leaves were Full of Children
Lenkiewicz is filmed talking about his projects.
In partnership with:
Overview
Robert Lenkiewicz created themed Projects investigating what he termed the invisible people or social outsiders. His sociological themes of vagrancy, mental handicap, suicide, old age and death and relational themes of love, jealousy, sexual behaviours and obsession. He made notes, drawings and paintings recording the physiological manifestation of social or personal relationships. The Lenkiewicz Foundation administers the artist’s legacy
Lenkiewicz faked his death for the Death Project evading media interest by staying at the stately home of his friend Peregrine Eliot, the tenth Earl of St Germans. “I could not know what it was like to be dead, but I could discover what it was like to be thought dead.” After his actual death in 2002, the embalmed corpse of a tramp Edwin McKenzie known as Diogenes was discovered. Lenkiewicz jokingly promised ‘to keep his body as a paperweight’ after death. In fact, the ‘artefact’ formed one compelling part of the painter’s observations on the theme of death, from the personal testimonies of terminally ill sitters to the unimaginable scale of genocide.
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