Little Deaths (2014) is a series of performative video vignettes in which artists Shanti Grumbine and Julia Oldham repeatedly attack, maim and murder each other in good humor. Referencing cinematic tropes from sources ranging from Twin Peaks to Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick comedies, the two women explore Freud’s ideas about the Death Drive and the Repetition Compulsion where traumatic events become ritualized and repeated in hopes of finding relief in the peaceful inorganic state before birth. The title “Little Deaths” also borrows from the French term “petite morte” meaning “orgasm” as a way of highlighting the accumulation of our daily losses and expenditures of life force. Together, Grumbine and Oldham reframe and exorcise the cultural representations of death that are subconsciously internalized in the body, using humor, repetition and ritual.