Belgian visual artist Dieter Ohler has spent more than 15 years compiling an extraordinary handwritten record of how newspapers report violent death. In this interview, he explains how the project began, why he has never missed a day, and what it reveals about proximity, empathy and the way the media reduces lives to statistics.
Every evening, Dieter Ohler sits down with a notebook and scans newspapers from around the world. He looks for headlines reporting deaths: murders, wars, disasters, migration, accidents and other forms of fatal violence. He then writes the headline down by hand, along with the number of people reported killed.
He has done this every day since 1 January 2011.
What began with a single sentence has grown into roughly 8,000 handwritten pages containing hundreds of thousands of entries. Ohler does not regard the work as a database. Nor is it quite a diary or an archive. Indeed, the project has no name.
Its origins lie partly in Ohler’s own experience. His mother was severely disabled, his father developed cancer of the spine, and Ohler himself suffered a serious accident that affected his brain. At one point, he abandoned his house, studio and art practice to care for both parents at home.
Unable to work as he had before, he began writing. What emerged was both an artwork and a critique of how the media reports death: the hierarchy it imposes on victims, the fixation on numbers and the way a human life can disappear behind a headline.
Here, Ohler explains what he has learned from recording the world’s deaths for more than a decade.
Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m a Belgian visual artist. I’m 50 now. I come from a pretty harsh background. My mother was disabled after a , my father became disabled, and I had a serious accident myself which affected my brain.
I went from university into visual arts because after the accident I couldn’t follow the university courses any more. Then, from visual arts, I went back to university to study art history. I finished that, and that is more or less my trajectory in brief.
How did this project begin?
I was working on my art practice when my father developed cancer in his spine. My mother had been disabled since I was a child and my father had always cared for her. Suddenly he couldn’t do that any more.
My mother trusts me blindly, so I gave up everything: my house, my work, my art practice, my studio. I went home to take care of her. My father was immediately considered palliative and also came home to die. He didn’t die, but that was the expectation.
So I was sitting at home between two severely disabled people, giving morphine, watching them, changing diapers, cooking and doing everything else.
My art practice changed. Instead of painting, I was sitting at a desk or at the table.
For a long time I had also been dissatisfied with the way the media reports certain things, particularly death. Something happens somewhere and one of the first questions is often: “Were any of our compatriots among the victims?” As if that is the most important thing.
The project really started from that dissatisfaction.
I was sitting at my desk and all I had was a notebook. I wrote one sentence. After that sentence I thought: OK, I’m going to continue with this.
There was no plan to write thousands of pages. I simply thought: I’ll write this down and see where it goes.
What exactly do you do?
Every evening or night I scan newspaper headlines from around the world. I look for reporting about death, casualties and victims.
I write down the headline exactly as it appears, together with the number of deaths being reported.
If one newspaper says 15 people have died, I write down 15. If another later reports 20 deaths from the same event, I don’t add another 20. I add five and note that the total has risen from 15 to 20.
If another newspaper then says 30, I add ten.
I try to keep the number attached to a particular event as accurate as I can, while still recording exactly how newspapers describe it.
How long have you been doing this?
Since 1 January 2011.
I haven’t missed a single day.
Did you initially keep a running total of all the deaths?
Yes. At first I was literally subtracting the deaths from the total global population.
But after a while it felt ethically wrong.
It began to feel as though I was waiting to see how many people had died that day so that I could subtract them. It felt like a game, and morally that wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.
These are dead people. Behind all these statistics there are people.
When you write something like “decapitated body found in sugarcane field”, there is an actual person behind that sentence. You write it down and then you move on to the next headline. Very quickly, the previous one has disappeared.
I didn’t want the project to become simply an exercise in adding and subtracting numbers.
Is that part of your criticism of the way death is reported, that people become statistics?
Absolutely.
Writing something down gives it a moment. I wouldn’t call it grief. That would give myself too much honour. I’m simply writing it down.
But yes, a number is still a number, and behind that number is a real person and a real family.
What do you ultimately want the project to become?
The more it grows, the more I think about what it could become.
I would like to make an installation from it, with projections across walls that are constantly changing. People would be able to read the material, but not have enough time to read everything.
I almost want them to become exhausted trying to follow it.
There would also be sound. I have experimented with reading different entries in seven overlapping layers. It falls on your shoulders. You hear lots of things, but at the same time you hear nothing. You might hear “death”, “Somalia” and other fragments, all layered together.
That would work alongside the physical books I already have.
Could technology change what is possible with the project?
AI is something I never imagined would become part of it.
There is now the possibility of scanning everything I have written and using handwriting recognition to put it into digital form.
Then perhaps patterns could emerge.
I don’t know what those patterns would be. Maybe homicides are rising, maybe they aren’t. I suspect deaths linked to climate will rise, but I don’t know.
What interests me is the possibility that people could explore it themselves. They could ask: is this a pattern? Is that a pattern? And perhaps AI could give them an answer.
I don’t know exactly what is technically possible because I’m not an IT specialist. But it opens up an interactive possibility. People could work with the headlines and numbers themselves and see what they find.
What has spending every day reading about death done to you personally?
When I stop, I stop.
I don’t take it to bed with me.
It takes time. I don’t go on holiday, for example. But emotionally I’m not actually seeing these people. I’m seeing a headline.
When I close the notebooks, it’s finished.
I know there are real people behind the titles and statistics. But I would be a hypocrite if I said I was emotionally devastated every night by what I read.
I have seen other things in life that affect me emotionally in a different way. These are headlines. When I close the notebook, I go to sleep.
Otherwise you couldn’t sleep any more.
After following these headlines since 2011, do you think things are getting better or worse?
They’re not getting better.
I have the feeling things are getting colder. By colder, I mean more distant. We don’t seem to have the same empathy.
Perhaps that applies to me as well. As I said, I’m not emotionally affected by every headline I write down.
But look at America and the headlines about children shooting each other, or very young people killing siblings. Or look at the way migration is discussed.
When migrants are trying to reach Europe, the discussion becomes: why are they coming here? We need to push them back. We need to close everything.
The question becomes less often: why are they fleeing? Are they hungry? What are they trying to escape?
That is what I mean by colder.
So your criticism is partly that journalism concentrates on the event rather than what lies behind it?
Yes. There might be 40 deaths in wildfires and the focus is on those 40 deaths. There is less focus on where those fires came from and whether climate change is behind them.
It is similar with migrants. We hear that they drowned. But why were they fleeing in the first place?
I understand that a journalist cannot tell the whole story every time. But so much comes down to: how many deaths? How many casualties?
It becomes clickbait. That bothers me.
And I am part of it, because I am also writing those numbers down.
But by writing the headlines into a notebook, I am taking them out of their original context and putting them into an art context. They become something else.
What do they become?
That depends on who is looking at them.
Someone interested in data might look at patterns in the numbers.
My father always looks at the moral questions. He asks me difficult things. For example: if a pregnant woman dies, do you count her as two people? Do you include the unborn child?
I don’t.
Then he asks: why not?
Those questions matter. They make me think about what I am doing and improve the work.
A journalist might look at it completely differently. They might ask: what am I writing? How are other journalists describing this? Is this the right way to report it?
Different people will see different things according to their backgrounds.
I don’t want to narrow that by telling spectators what they are supposed to see.
Did you always imagine other people would eventually see this work?
No. That came later.
I simply started. I had no idea where it was going.
It began with dissatisfaction about the news. Then it became a notebook. Then two notebooks. Then ten notebooks.
Eventually you realise that it matters to different people in different ways.
Maybe, for a person whose child has died, it matters that I wrote it down.
But I can’t write everyone down, and that creates a kind of guilt. Maybe that is the thing that affects me most emotionally: knowing I cannot include everyone.
I sometimes imagine somebody asking: “Why isn’t my child in there? He was in the news too. Why didn’t you write him down?”
Have you noticed a hierarchy in whose deaths get reported?
Proximity is the biggest factor: geographical proximity, economic proximity, racial proximity.
And it works in every direction.
Western newspapers are less likely to report something that happens in Afghanistan. But the reverse can also be true: in Afghanistan, you are less likely to see reporting about something that happens here.
Proximity is the hierarchy. I think that is the most important factor.
Do you know how many entries you have made since 2011?
There are about 8,000 pages, and I would guess there are around 40 lines on each page.
Each line is a newspaper headline, rather than necessarily one individual death. A headline might represent one death or 50 deaths, or many more.
So we are talking about hundreds of thousands of entries and a far greater number of deaths behind them.
What would you like people to do in response to the project?
I hope nobody ever has the need to become part of these notebooks.
But really, it is a humble act.
I’m not asking anybody to do anything. Every evening I simply sit down and write. That’s it.
If somebody wants to do something with the work, or help bring attention to it, then I’m very thankful.
But I’m not asking the world to respond in a particular way.
Finally, what is the project called?
It doesn’t have a name.
That is also connected to my mother. She had very severe aphasia. She had no words. She couldn’t give names to things.
I have something similar with what I’m doing. It isn’t easy to give anything the right name. Every name I give it feels like the wrong name.
Is it a diary? No.
Is it an archive? No, because an archive is something you can search. You can’t really look things up in this.
Is it a ledger? Maybe.
I don’t know.
I don’t have a name for it.
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