FINAL PROJECT – Study to Revive a Beloved One – Monochrome Posthumous – art 350

During the months of confinement in 2020, the number of deaths from Covid 19 increased dramatically every day around the world. One of the most poignant images to frame my memory and go around the world like so many others was New York City’s Mass Graveyard on Hart Island during the pandemic. The dead that no one claims, the unidentified and the destitute, used to be buried. The city announced that the Island would also be used in this case for the burials of the dead from the virus unclaimed after 14 days in the morgue.

The first thing that came to mind was a sense of helplessness and loneliness, thinking about all those anonymous people being buried in that cemetery for the forgotten.

A wooden box with a number and carved inscription. A mechanical and repetitive burial carried out by excavators and officials. A humble burial where simplicity speeds up the process.

I decided to make a piece around this image, building a multidisciplinary composition that speaks about the idea of the funeral procession as a central part of the action. Memories, Cosmology, and sacred symbols carved by the worms, in the wood, as an initiatory process to the beyond.

The rhythmic and mechanical sound of a bell sustains in time a timeless and posthumous ceremony. A hospital bed sheet works as a shroud impregnated with transforming energy with the imprint of an inevitable outcome.