Institute For The Ghosts Of Essex
Studio Moon
Team Member One: Eglé Packauskaite
Nationality: Lithuanian
Institution: University of Greenwich
Company: Tarkett and Desso
Team Member Two: Sarah Aisling Brooke
Nationality: British
Institution: University of Greenwich
The Institute for the Ghosts of Essex
Spirits Among Us
#ghost #mourning #remembrance #burial #cemetery
The Institute for the Ghosts of Essex is a journey for the living and the deceased. Epping Forest is a site of loss; approximately 30 unidentified bodies are found each year; unidentified, left and lost. The institute is a home for the forgotten dead, whose bodies are examined in a mortuary. All evidence is collected and carefully stored for future identification. Every person is given a burial rite in the memorial chamber in accordance with spiritual rituals that help the unidentified soul leave the physical body and move into the ethereal. The ‘building’ embodies this ethereal place, its architecture mimics life itself through translating the occupant’s movements into a spectacle full of presence; physical or nonmaterial. The body’s journey ends in the forest, their resting place being beside an existing tree that acts as the person’s burial marker. The institute is a place of remembrance, with extensive archives held in hopes the public can identify their lost ones. It is a place of mourning and comfort that comes with laying one’s dear ones to rest. Here, the dead are found not to haunt, but to be found by, the living. And stay if they wish.