DEBITUM NATURAE is the third movement of work from Boys Be Good. The exhibition component opened on June 5, 2012 in Washington, DC at the gallery Arts@1830. On June 19th the full movement was launched with a night of performance art, fundraiser for the It Gets Better Project, and zine launch, also at Arts@1830.
 

DEBITUM NATURAE, loosely translated, means “the debt of nature”. A life is spent in repayment to that which brought it forth. It is from this consideration that our movement takes a framework. A monument attempts to bring the timeless into time. And for our purposes, a similar process is echoed. The action of taking something epic, something bigger than humanity and making it vulnerable, temporal, and human. As in our title, giving the miracle of life an expiration date. 

It isn’t the monument to the loss, or a warning for the present, but a suggestion that really moves us. An idea of where to look or what to see. As a culture and as individuals, we are always in a moment somewhere between growth and decay. Somewhere between understanding and ignorance. Poetry is in the pursuit, the feeling, grasping, touching finally the perception of this search for meaning and legacy. We begin to see and feel and reckon with, but not “know”, the terrain of this cultural and emotional sojourn toward remembrance, valuation and understanding of the past. Debitum Naturae becomes a reminder: your life is not truly yours, it belongs to what has come before you and what will come after you. And this is it: you, just by being here, encompass the biggest moments we have, then made flesh, singular, and finite.

— Christopher Cunetto