ABSTRACT
Birth and death are the two events in human life that are the most enriched with symbolism and meaning. To me, death marks a new beginning, in a spiritual sense: the paradoxical moment when a new arterial system commences and at the same time the physical system ends. That is when the nervous system, which aspires to control everything, finds its journey over. For me, the cemeteries are places where material body and human spirit are retrieved. If we look back at urban burial practices of the twentieth century, the age of humanism, we find that this important event – death – was socially ignored, hidden and often completely erased from sight. Through my design practice I try to bring questions of death and burial to the discussion table. In a country with an extremely low birth rate and an increasingly ageing population we need to discuss death openly so that we can better understand the ways in which we live.
