Design for a Crematorium at Kortrijk Belgium
source: Eduardo Souto de Moura, concursos competitions 1979-2010
book
Live in a funeral home!
“Tootje, living in a funeral home” is the story of an outsider who penetrates into the world of the funeral.
Lieke Northman is a coffee lady in a funeral home. Gradually she discovers the wonderful world of the funeral business: look with red socks, receptionists with plunging necklines and the secrets of the discard basement. She meets survivors in all shapes and sizes, and discovers that grief takes many forms.
forty stories and poems for forgotten lives
‘De eenzame uitvaart’ (the lonely funeral) is a literary and social project in which poets accompany the lonely dead to their final resting place.
Deathscapes
Death is at once a universal and everyday, but also an extraordinary experience in the lives of those affected. Death and bereavement are thereby intensified at (and frequently contained within) certain sites and regulated spaces, such as the hospital, the cemetery and the mortuary. However, death also affects and unfolds in many other spaces: the home, public spaces and places of worship, sites of accident, tragedy and violence. Such spaces, or Deathscapes, are intensely private and personal places, while often simultaneously being shared, collective, sites of experience and remembrance; each place mediated through the intersections of emotion, body, belief, culture, society and the state.
Bringing together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural studies academics and historians among others, this book focuses on the relationships between space/place and death/ bereavement in ‘western’ societies. Addressing three broad themes: the place of death; the place of final disposition; and spaces of remembrance and representation, the chapters reflect a variety of scales ranging from the mapping of bereavement on the individual or in private domestic space, through to sites of accident, battle, burial, cremation and remembrance in public space.
The book also examines social and cultural changes in death and bereavement practices, including personalisation and secularisation. Other social trends are addressed by chapters on green and garden burial, negotiating emotion in public/ private space, remembrance of violence and disaster, and virtual space. A meshing of material and ‘more-than-representational’ approaches consider the nature, culture, economy and politics of Deathscapes – what are in effect some of the most significant places in human society.
Rituals and habits in Europe, in the history of death!
