memorialisation

Day out for the family skulls

15 November 2012
Charles
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Categories: memorialisation

From Wikipedia: Dia de los ñatitas (“Day of the Skulls”) is a festival celebrated in La Paz, Bolivia, on May 5. In pre–Columbian times, indigenous Andeans had a tradition of sharing a day with the bones of their ancestors on the third year after burial; however, only the skulls are used today. Traditionally, the skulls of family members are kept at home to watch over the family and protect them during the year. On November 9, the family crowns the skulls with fresh flowers, sometimes also dressing them in various garments, and making offerings of cigarettes, coca leaves, alcohol, and various other items in thanks for the year’s protection. The skulls are also sometimes taken to the central cemetery in La Paz for a special Mass and blessing.

Graveland

12 November 2012
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Art and death, memorialisation

Carla Conte is holding an exhibition in late January 2013. The title is Graveland. The venue is the Crypt Gallery, London. 

Graveland takes a curious look at cemeteries and tributes from around the world, exploring ways we remember, through photography & art.

Photography, stories, objects and decorations will show some of the many different ways we commemorate a person worldwide, from the traditional to the the more unusual. This will be further explored by artwork including drawings, sculpture, installations, photographic art, film and craft.

During the week we will be making the most of the space by holding a music workshop, book club and Death Cafe, as well as holding an opening event with performances.

You can find out more on Carla’s web page. I’ll give you the link in a moment. Be patient, for heaven’s sake. 

Here’s the rub. Carla needs to raise £1000 to hold this exhibition, and she’s doing that by crowdfunding. 

We very much want you to support her because we think Carla’s terrific and we feel certain her show is going to be great. 

Please do this NOW. Just 100 tenners will see her home and dry.

Go to her web page, read all about it, then click on a Pledge button on the rhs. 

Together, we, the GFG readership, can help make something beautiful happen. 

LET’S DO IT!

Ed’s Note: Is the Kickstarter website safe? Yes it is. Type that question into Google and do your due diligence. 

Diagonal Daze in St Mary’s Churchyard, Twyford

8 November 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: burial, cemeteries, memorialisation, Memorialising

Posted by Eleanor Whitby

I was wandering around a churchyard on that one sunny  summer’s day, as you do, and came upon a few really lovely headstones.

The first was surrounded by a burst of colour in a green area of flat memorials in the council owned section – I loved the smooth, pebble like surface and the little indentation which created a bird bath.

I moved round to the church owned section and was taken aback because all the graves were at an angle to the path – obviously positioned to face East, but it created a diagonal vista across the cemetery which I’d never seen before. There must have been a fashion for rough hewn stones as there were several – but I liked this one’s inscription:

” Oh! Call it not death – ‘Tis a holy sleep”

Then I came across the only wooden memorial – cleft from a huge piece of oak. The owner’s name long lost in the ravages of wind and weather – but just look at how  it has dried and stretched and shrunk and cracked, yet still stands tall and proud.

Hiding amongst holly trees,  a prickly barrier against would be intruders to the peace of this long lost grave.This next one then made me stop still for quite a long while – hand hewn by a loving father? husband? brother? So poignant in its home-madeness – I had to touch it and run my fingers over the clumsy lettering that had been chiselled with such love.

As I made my way out, my eye was drawn to this small headstone set back from the path, almost lost by all the cremation plot markers. The angled words completing my diagonal day. What a wonderful inscription, I resolved to make an effort to be more of a light!

Double standards?

6 November 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Gangster funerals, memorialisation

There’s a very characteristic Daily Mail story in, of all places, today’s Daily Mail.

It describes outrage in the environs of Wisbech concerning the ‘floral tributes’ which adorned the funeral of a notably industrious armed robber, Thomas Curtis. One of the tributes, above, took the form of an ATM machine of the sort that Mr Curtis was wont to rip untimely from all sorts of premises. The screen is from one of his spoils. 

It’s worth order cialis from mexico surveying the other tributes here and in the Sun here. 

Perhaps it’s a matter of relative status, but Mr Curtis’s flowery accolades have not been accorded the dispassionate treatment accorded to those which adorned the funeral of Charlie Richardson. One of them, you recall, commemorated the the black, handle-driven World War Two army generator with which Charlie electrocuted his victims, below:

Tattoo – A friend in death?

23 October 2012
Charles
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Categories: Academia and death, funerals in other cultures, memento mori, memorialisation, Memorialising, Personalisation, Ritual

The Rise of the Maori Tribal Tattoo

By Ngahuia Te Awekotuku
University of Waikato, New Zealand

Body adornment – swirling curves of black on shoulders, thighs, lower back, arms, upper feet, rear calves – has become an opportunity for storytelling as well. Some symbols represent children born, targets reached, places visited, and increasingly, memories of special people who have passed away.

In August 2006, Te Arikinui Dame te Atairangikaahu, affectionately known as the Maori Queen, died after a long illness.

Her people were devastated. Many wanted to commemorate her in a special way, and 16 women chose to memorialise her by taking a traditional facial tattoo. I was humbled to be one of them. There are now more than 50 of us, mostly older and involved in the ceremonial life of our people. It is a fitting memento mori.

But moko, most of all, is about life. It is about beauty and glamour, and its appearance on the bodies of musicians such as Robbie Williams and Ben Harper is not unusual. Although it is often contentious, raising issues of cultural appropriation, and ignorant use of traditional art as fashion.
However we must also acknowledge that Maori artists are sharing this art – they are marking the foreign bodies.

The important reality remains – it is ours. It is about beauty, and desire, about identity and belonging. It is about us, the Maori people.

As one venerable elder stated, more than a century ago, “Taia o moko, hei hoa matenga mou” (Inscribe yourself, so you have a friend in death).

Because it is forever.

Read the whole article published on the BBC website September 21st 2012  here

Posted by Evelyn

Crookback dug up?

13 September 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: burial, memorialisation

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

A skeleton, a skeleton, my kingdom for a skeleton! 

Might we soon discover if Richard III is the hunchbacked tyrant with a withered arm depicted in Shakespeare or if his physical disability was merely Tudor propaganda? 

The king was buried in the church of a Franciscan friary in Leicester after being slain at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. But the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII just over 50 years later has resulted in the exact burial spot being forgotten. 

Now Leicester University archeologists, having examined historical maps, have located the most likely site for the church—a car park of the social services office in the centre of Leicester.

 More here. And more unfolding in the news daily.

Ed’s note: Apologies to Richard the R for the lateness of this. We are way off the pace in all areas just now.

A neglected grave

5 September 2012
Charles
20 Comments
Categories: memorialisation

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

To Clergy House for a council meeting of the Friends of Westminster Cathedral. It’s the council’s job to organise fundraising events from concerts to barbecues for the upkeep of said cathedral, and to plan the best ways to spend the money raised. There are separate charitable initiatives that support the London homeless or international aid agencies, so the Friends’ work focuses on housekeeping matters: a mosaics appeal for the Chapel of St George and the English Martyrs, for example; the repair of a leaking roof; new lavatories for visitors, or the purchase of new missals for the year ahead.

While with clerical and lay council members in the wood-panelled library, a dinner is suggested to honour John Francis Bentley (1839-1902), the acclaimed architect responsible for the neo-Byzantine magnificence of the Cathedral.

During the meeting, I learn Bentley is buried, not in his architectural legacy, but in a cemetery in Mortlake, West London, and that his simple tombstone is neglected and in need of restoration, there apparently being noone left to take on its upkeep.

There are so many causes out there but it seemed sad that Bentley, though remembered in art history books, is being forgotten in his resting place. Something will be done about it.

Footnote: Other more famous worthies have no such anonymity. See here the much-visited graves of stars including Oscar Wilde, Bruce Lee, Princess Diana, Frank Sinatra and Jim Morrison.

Memorials of shame

22 August 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: memorialisation

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

The world is full of memorials to those who have left it, from the Pyramids of Egypt and India’s Taj Mahal to benches on the Promenade in Brighton and central Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

The latter, by architect Peter Eisenman, has been criticised for being too abstract and for not presenting historical information in the form of plaques or religious symbols. It’s also, of course, been dismissed by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, a Holocaust denier who continues to threaten the destruction of Israel.

But many find it beautiful and moving. Consisting of 2,711 large, plain, rectangular stones of varying heights over five acres of undulating land, some visitors compare the slabs to coffins, others to concentration camp huts. They can walk through the labyrinth of pathways between the slabs, which aims to evoke feelings of loss and disorientation.

Modern Germany should be applauded as one of the few nations brave and humble enough to erect memorials to immortalise its own shame.

Near the Holocaust memorial, Berlin authorities have also unveiled a Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism. It consists of a stone cuboid, on the front of which is a window through which visitors can see a short film of two kissing men. The window has been smashed by vandals on at least two occasions, and there have also been complaints by lesbians over the absence of women kissing. Lesbians victimised under Nazism have not been documented, though there are instances recorded of lesbian pubs being forced to close.

Berlin’s eagerness to make amends for Germany’s 20th century crimes continues with long-delayed plans for a memorial commemorating some 500,000 murdered gypsies (Sinti and Roma). The design is a small pool of water with a triangular island in the middle displaying a Roma rose.

This time, bickering is holding up completion, with disagreements between installation artist Dani Karavan and the council client over issues of construction materials and expenses.

Pity those who sit on memorial committees. Maybe Berlin should have built one memorial for all Nazi victims. Or perhaps not.

The seaside memorial bench

10 August 2012
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: memorialisation

Ken West thinks the seaside memorial bench a peculiarly English thing. Is it? The GFG simply doesn’t get out enough to know. Do our continental friends and neighbours commemorate their LOs in this way?

Ken also observes that seaside promenades are becoming very popular for the strewing of mortal cremains — often so thickly it take weeks for them to disappear.

Views?