FLOATING CEMETERY
FLOATING CEMETERY
Repairing the lost bond
Team information:
- Name + Surname: Fabián Leiva
- Nationality: Chilean
- Institution: University of Chile
FLOATING CEMETERY
Repairing the lost bond
#ralcoreservoir #pehuenche #floodedcemetery #memorial #threshold
In 2004 the cemetery of the Pehuenche community of Alto Biobío (Chile) was unexpectedly flooded, leaving the inhabitants staring to millions of cubic meters of water that separate them from their ancestors. From this tragedy was born the idea of reparation, bounding and communication, in order to create a space for the memory of a sacred place, wich was damaged and rendered impossible to be recovered, that bring the community closer to its dead.
Based on the Pehuenche cosmovision, the project places itself over the water and over the flooded cemetery as a meeting point between the living and the dead, generating a threshold through a simple and pure volume, lacking of any symbolism but loaded in content in its spatiality, giving opportunity to the spirits of the living to rest next their ancestors.
This is how we can attempt to make visible something that wanted to be hidden, to raise a truth again over the water, projecting a work whose complexity is not found in his formal or material characteristics, but rather in its sensibility to approach to a problem that seems impossible to solve; until we realize that the connection to repair, is mainly on a spiritual plane.