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This essay explores the instances in which human remains were used as material for contemporary artworks. Partly, the aim of the research is to find out why these materials are used and why it is important for the intended purpose of the artist that they do so. Another part of the aim is to investigate the representational layers of the material, and how the use of the material fits into a larger sociological context surrounding what we consider “proper care” of the dead. This is achieved through a thematic interpretive analysis which looks at the representation of the material, disruption of the dead and intention provided by the artists through the theoretical perspectives of Thomas Laqueur, Robert Hertz and Amelia Jones. In the end, the research concludes that the use of human remains as material for artworks is an intentional and imperative choice by the artists, who use the material to make grander statements about predetermined social orders and provide alternative ways of conceiving remains. For this to be done, the disruption of those social orders is a vital act, which is achieved through the disruption of human remains, making the “proper care” of the dead a necessarily neglected process. The fact that these bodies do represent a self, a life which has been previously lived with differing degrees of immediacy, is also required for the previously mentioned disruption to be able to take place. Our inherent insistence to access these represented selves serves to cause discomfort and redirect our attention to the will of the artists, who, in the making of the artwork, either repress or collaborate with the represented selves in order to make the statements which they set out to make. 

We measured the Coulomb dissociation of 16O into 4He and 12C at the R3B setup in a first campaign within FAIR Phase 0 at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt. The goal was to improve the accuracy of the experimental data for the 12C(α,γ)16O fusion reaction and to reach lower center-ofmass energies than measured so far. The experiment required beam intensities of 109 16O ions per second at an energy of 500 MeV/nucleon. The rare case of Coulomb breakup into 12C and 4He posed another challenge: The magnetic rigidities of the particles are so close because of the same mass-to-charge-number ratio A/Z = 2 for 16O, 12C and 4He. Hence, radical changes of the R3B setup were necessary. All detectors had slits to allow the passage of the unreacted 16O ions, while 4He and 12C would hit the detectors’ active areas depending on the scattering angle and their relative energies. We developed and built detectors based on organic scintillators to track and identify the reaction products with sufficient precision. This project was carried out within FAIR Phase 0 at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt. This project was supported by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (05P19RFFN1, 05P15RFFN1, 05P15RDFN1), HGS-HIRE, HIC for FAIR and the GSI-TU Darmstadt cooperation agreement. I. Gašparić and R. Popočovski have been supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under projects no. 1257 and 7194. 8 pags., 3 figs.