Mourning Glory

Mathius Scibor (Au Matt) / Au Matt & Pepe Le Puke / Poland

Mourning Glory is a taboo-defying adult VR experience presenting queer perspectives on the afterlife.
Build as an installation facilitating a collective experience through a multiplayer VR journey into the after. Initiated by putting on an HMD death mask, it is an exercise in imagining an alternative to religious heavens and hells, as well as Silicon Valley fantasies of cloud-based consciousness. Mourning Glory begins where most stories end: just after you die.

Both documentary and fantasy, the piece is driven by interviews with queer people reflecting on our lives and imaginations surrounding death. An eclectic cast of performers, porn stars, musicians, activists, and city dwellers share their experiences and reenact their fantasies in a series of 3D-scanned vignettes. Powered by Gaussian Splatting techniques, they appear as frozen traces, remnants of those who have already moved on, while you- the visitor- exist as a newly dead consciousness, ready to flirt.

Stories unfold not as linear narratives but as seductive encounters: confessions, objects charged with biography, staged moments of death that reveal lives shaped by exclusion, love, fantasy, desire, and resistance. Through connection, participants collectively find climactic release and liberation.

Mourning Glory treats the afterlife as a political problem. It addresses necropolitics: the systems that take control after death, deciding how queer lives are named, corrected, archived, or erased once the body can no longer speak. Against this violence, the work proposes imagination as agency and erotic as life- affirming force.

By expanding queer culture into the afterlife, it refuses fear as the dominant response to death. It claims pleasure, heat, and imagination as acts of resistance and of reconciling with mortality in a culture that taboos it.