Burial Sites
On View at The Neon Heater
Findlay, OH
February 2-24, 2024
Who gets to be remembered?
How is memory materially produced in place?
How are burial sites made and maintained by the living?
How might we honor the unnamed, unmarked, and forgotten?
What is the living’s responsibility to the dead?
What remains?
Burial Sites is a social practice project considering how burial landscapes reflect cultural rituals around death, mourning processes, and community politics. The project use accumulation to grapple with the task of documentation and the archive through images of monuments for the dead.
Burial Sites comprises 13,000 images, spans 15 countries across six continents, and features over 250 cemeteries, memorials, crematoriums, and graveyards. In each site, the camera is used as a drawing apparatus mirroring the body’s movement as it walks through the landscape, capturing hundreds of images as research, documents, and embodied records. The camera’s attention wanders to the in-between spaces of memory and rests its lens on the seemingly mundane elements of each site’s infrastructure. The resulting collection of images features gardening tools, garbage cans, cracks in monuments, foliage, decorative symbols, religious ephemera, and signage. These peripheral images point to various traditions, religions, and histories embedded in sites of burial. The book’s investigations generate questions about the unique entanglements of time, maintenance, social hierarchy, politics, and the community’s role in place-making.
At the Neon Heater, Burial Sites takes the form of an installation of thousands of images expanding across the neon orange walls of the gallery. A reader accompanies the installation, weaving together personal narratives, field notes, unanswered questions, and theoretical citations from multiple disciplines. This volume of text includes stories from cemetery administrators, funeral conductors, undertakers, and community members.
