Universitat de València

The Institute for the History of Medicine and Science López Piñero (joint center of the University of Valencia and CSIC), located in the Palacio de Cerveró and in collaboration with Grupo Mémora, presents the conference "What is life?" to be held on Tuesday June 19th at 18:30 pm in the Institute's Conference Room. The talk, given by the psychopedagogist and Doctor in Education Sciences Mar cortina Selva, expert in pedagogy of death, will address the idea of ​​life as a journey of no return where the only certainty we have is its end and how this awareness gives meaning and value to life. She will speak of life as questioning where our doubts necessary and will also address the suffering inherent to existence and how to turn it around to get stronger from the losses and challenges that life places before us.

According Mar Cortina, by banishing death from our culture over the past 60 years there has been a desecration of life. For the speaker, "this process concludes with the oblivion of death and all that it may be related: religion, God, the ontological nature of man, the value of life and its purpose." According to Mar Cortina, materialistic inspiration kills everything with the insensitivity of ignorance -the new poverty-. This modern contempt for death is related to the modern, exaggerated contempt for life. The disqualification of life as sacred has consequences as ignorance, lack of knowledge, insensitivity and lack of solidarity. Therefore, for the speaker, recovering the transcendent meaning of life and giving back to death the main role in the film of life , would lead to a less ignorant, more sensitive, more caring and less selfish society.

 The conference is part of the conference series on funerary art exhibition called "The other side of life. Funeral Culture yesterday and today," organized by the University of Valencia (UVEG), the CSIC and Grupo Mémora. The exhibition, opened on Friday 8 June at the Institute López Piñero, will be open until August 31 and includes more than one hundred original burial archaeological pieces used throughout history, mostly in the Iberian Peninsula . Its main objective is to foster critical thinking about the vision of death as another side of life and to show how cultures have understood Mediterranean funeral rites and grave goods that they developed and used for this purpose.

Mar Cortina

Mar Cortina Selva is a teacher, graduate in Psychology and Doctor in Education Sciences with her thesis "The film as a teaching resource for death education: Implications for teacher training", which she defended in May 2010 at the Autonomous University of Madrid. She works as a psychopedagogist in Secondary Education and as a professor in Florida Universitària. She also conducts training seminars and conferences on the standardization of death. In 2001 she founded the Spanish Association of Thanatology, which she presides over and which organized the I, II, III and IV Conference on Love and Death in Valencia (2001-2008). She is the author of the instructional guide of the film "Las Alas de al Vida" (The Wings of the life), from the child's tale "On és el iaio?" (Where is grandpa?), published by Tandem in 2001. She is also the coauthor, with Agustín de la Herrán, of the handbook "La muerte y su didáctica" (Death and Teaching), published by Universitas in 2006, and of the last book also published by Universitas in December 2011, "Pedagogy of death through film" as well as of various articles on related topics. Nowadays she is preparing a script for the documentary Children and death and she is also working on creating an University Institute for Education for Death.