MAKING SPACE FOR THE OTHER. Cemeteries as performing Places for inclusive, safe, resilient Societies: an interdisciplinary Project

The project investigates the performativity of space considering it a condition in building inclusive multicultural societies, because space is a very relevant medium in the building of social equity and sustainability. Instead of dealing with museums, libraries or piazzas, the focus is on specific places not yet taken into account in their relevance for the question, i.e. cemeteries. The sacred and death are archetypal themes of space; around them the very meaning of the process of human civilisation revolves and the original meaning of architecture with it. Contemporary societies remove the theme of death, due to their “overriding interest in self-preservation and domination” (Scherer). Even though the images of wars and pandemic seem to urge society to take it seriously, the “homo technologicus” model removes everything it cannot control (and death is one of them). The project considers that new reflections on finitude and placeness of human beings can open new ways for living together. The project takes an interdisciplinary point of view, but by working in a philosophical horizon. Philosophy considered death most of all from a temporal perspectives, therefore cemeteries were neglected. However, the project highlights that a spatial consideration effects the temporal one (Foucault, Baudrillard-De Certeau et.al.) and contributes to thinking about death in a concrete rather than abstract way. Because also “time can be read in space” (Schlögel), architecture is very relevant for the project, even if in the twentieth century it underwent a big change, suffering consideration only because of its usefulness and strength. A re-designed architectural point of view allows the project to interweave aesthetic, cultural and practical considerations. Moreover, the project questions any reduction (for example of the city of dead to the city of living, of use value to exchange value…). Instead of a reduction paradigm it proposes a co-presence paradigm, and points to cemeteries as complex co-presence of dead and living, different cultural and religious traditions, representations and worships. Thus it shows a way to rethink the very form of public space, freeing it from the univocity of the “homo technologicus” and opening it up to the anthropological complexity of the human existence. Cemeteries concern all human beings but differently, they are very paradoxical places – between life and death, private and public, differences and things in common, natural and cultural, past and future – so they offer a complex point of view which is very generative for thinking and innovative for social practices. Therefore the project emphasises cemeteries as diaphragms that help to discover conditions of possibility for performing more inclusive, fair, sustainable societies.