When I was a child in the South of France, I use to spend whole weekend afternoons in our village’ cemetery. It was like a quiet city, I thought. I had a favorite tomb that I would always visit first, a 3-year-old victim of the 1918 Spanish Influenza. The little girl was looking at me from a faded enameled photograph, a white bow in her hair. Her grave was a metal-framed childbed with a cross. I was fascinated. It was as visiting people I knew, like an invisible friendship. I loved the massive family graves that I assumed were houses. Doors, windows, name shields, even knocking hands, as if one would be able to knock and get invited in. Steps, stone beds and metal curtains, ornaments, flowers under globes: a revealed universe parallel to my own. But real, tangible, huge, intricate, populated, dense like a city, a city of death.
1 — Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 1981 2 — Id. “In 1231, the Church Council of Rouen forbade dancing in cemeteries or churches under pain of excommunication”.
3 — Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, Diacritics, 1986
Cemeteries and graves are a prevalent research topic and much has been written about death and its social rituals. Scholars have been researching anthropological, social, legal, economical and political aspects of human finality. Philippe Ariès, specialist of death, focused on the history of attitudes and cultural responses to death and dying. While he claims that medieval Christian Europe had has death tamed, apprivoisée, as a simple switch from life to paradise, he argues that modern relations towards death evolved in excluding death from our ordinary existence. Due to growing individualism, communal and spiritual responses towards death have been erased and modern death has become ‘invisible’.1 This is not only a social trend related to the ‘act’ of dying, but also to the spatial presence of death, the storage of remains and their representation. The late XVIIth century marks the spatial move of cemeteries towards the outside of urban centers, revealing a change in function, graveyards are no more spaces of social interaction.2 As urban growth encompassed cemeteries in ever-growing urban centers, new remote sites were chosen in vain attempts to leave the city behind. But while the displacement of graveyards translated the urge to keep death at distance, and to have the living separated from the dead, honoring the sepulchers was still required. Foucault in Of other Spaces points at the precise relation between the city and its dead: It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the CEMETERY.3 11