The story of atoms
Name + Surname of each team member
Manuel Alejandro Suárez Hernández / Haruka Tonegawa
Nationality
Mexico / Japan
Institution
Moya Moya
The story of atoms: exchanges between life and death
HASHTAGS
#CompostBurial
#Museum_Of_Life
#Back_to_the_Nature
#Urban_Public_Deathscape
#StoryMatters
DESCRIPTION
“When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me—but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.”
The Journal of a Disappointed Man – W.N.P. Barbellion
This ‘compost burial’ cemetery serves as a public and educational space with a family digital archive. The technology and service to compost human bodies already exist but never had an adequate idea to accommodate much of the produce, while cemeteries have been ‘physically public but socially closed’ on the outskirts or in the mountains.
The sustainable cemetery full of memorial trees and flowers is publicly open, letting the body-composing atoms flow but maintaining the societal existence and life trajectory of the deceased.
A cemetery could be a place, harmoniously situated in dynamic and urban circumstances, to learn and celebrate life stories as well as being a park loved by various visitors including the next generation children. By promoting such positivity instead of the stigma and sorrow surrounding death and a dead body, the forest of compost burial should impact people’s thoughts and options of both how to live and how to be dead.