Garden on the Grave

Garden on the Grave is a site-sensitive audio performance experienced through personal smartphone and headphones in a cemetery.

Urban cemeteries emerged as a response to the urbanization of the 19th century. The burgeoning population of cities was filling up the old churchyards, burial grounds and vaults. This need for burial space was met by large landscaped garden graveyards where local people could both mourn the dead and refresh themselves amidst busy urban life. 

Garden on the Grave approaches garden cemeteries as ‘living places’, where cultural and ecological processes are inseparably intertwined. Inspired by the 19th century’s flourishing individualism and romantic view of nature, the landscape architecture of these mortuaries blend in with the centuries-long cycles of decaying and becoming. 

A rotting corpse is full of life. As bodies are laid in earth, they start to decompose and break down into simple organic matter. Slowly merging with the soil, the bodies return their nutrients to the vast ecosystem of the cemetery. They meld, evolve and flourish amidst the tombstones as willows, poplars, and wild roses.

The site-sensitive performance invites participants to observe themselves as an integral part of the material and biological world. The cemetery, often negatively associated with death and decay, can be a place where diverse life flourishes and our mortality can be seen as a part of the endless ecological cycle. It guides viewers to contemplate the relationships, temporalities, emotions and rewildings that these gardens embody.