TogetherWeGlow
Team Info
Team member 1: Andrew Gonzales Team member 2: Jourdon Miller
Nationality: United States
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
TogetherWeGlow Capturing decompositional heat energy to connect the bereaved and deceased
#LightNeverDies #GuidingGlow #NormalizeGrief #NeighborhoodDeathPlazas #InDeathWeGlow
Religion and upbringing aside, the process of death is the same. Internal organs decompose first. The skin shifts from green to red as gases and heat bloat the rotting corpse. Eventually, the liquefied remains seep into the ground.
The modern industrial death economy severs us from this grotesque truth, overwhelming a traditional practice deeply unique to each community. Capitalism asserts its dominance in our most vulnerable state, robbing us of our ability to grieve.
How might a community look if the extended process of death was constructed as a vital part of its social and physical fabric?
To push against Capitalist expansion, many cities reclaim the street from automobiles as anthropocentric spaces. We take this concept one step further by inserting death as an integral part of pedestrian plazas.
The dead reside in individual pods in tubes that aid in the process of decomposition. The natural thermal output of bodily decomposition is harnessed to power a lighting installation surrounding each tube, illuminating a fully accessible underground world of the “living” dead. This intervention normalizes grief in a highly public manner, highlights the role of death as essential in our communities, and ultimately brings us together.
In death, we glow.