ABOUT
Burial Sites is an artist’s book and social practice project considering how burial landscapes reflect cultural rituals around death, mourning processes, and community politics. The book is a project of accumulation, grappling with the task of documentation and the archive through images of monuments for the dead.
Burial Sites comprises 13,000 images, spans 15 countries across six continents, and features over 250 cemeteries, memorials, crematoriums, and graveyards. In each site, the camera is used as a drawing apparatus mirroring the body’s movement as it walks through the landscape, capturing hundreds of images as research, documents, and embodied records. The camera’s attention wanders to the in-between spaces of memory and rests its lens on the seemingly mundane elements of each site’s infrastructure. The resulting collection of images features gardening tools, garbage cans, cracks in monuments, foliage, decorative symbols, religious ephemera, and signage. These peripheral images point to various traditions, religions, and histories embedded in sites of burial. The book’s investigations generate questions about the unique entanglements of time, maintenance, social hierarchy, politics, and the community’s role in place-making.
Who gets to be remembered?
How is memory materially produced in place?
How are burial sites made and maintained by the living?
How might we honor the unnamed, unmarked, and forgotten?
What is the living’s responsibility to the dead?
What remains?
Burial Sites comprises 13,000 images, spans 15 countries across six continents, and features over 250 cemeteries, memorials, crematoriums, and graveyards. In each site, the camera is used as a drawing apparatus mirroring the body’s movement as it walks through the landscape, capturing hundreds of images as research, documents, and embodied records. The camera’s attention wanders to the in-between spaces of memory and rests its lens on the seemingly mundane elements of each site’s infrastructure. The resulting collection of images features gardening tools, garbage cans, cracks in monuments, foliage, decorative symbols, religious ephemera, and signage. These peripheral images point to various traditions, religions, and histories embedded in sites of burial. The book’s investigations generate questions about the unique entanglements of time, maintenance, social hierarchy, politics, and the community’s role in place-making.
Who gets to be remembered?
How is memory materially produced in place?
How are burial sites made and maintained by the living?
How might we honor the unnamed, unmarked, and forgotten?
What is the living’s responsibility to the dead?
What remains?
Burial Sites was first published as a collection of 14 handbound books titled Leave No Stone Unturned.
This iteration was exhibited as an interactive gallery installation at Urban Arts Space in Columbus, OH in the spring of 2022.
Burial Sites was printed by UniPrint at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
The covers were printed at the Columbus Printed Arts Center on a Vandercook No. 4 Proof Press.
There are 50 copies in this edition, including 12 volumes and a reader.
The font is Proxima Nova.
Burial Sites is published, written, and designed by Lydia Smith.
ISBN: 979-8-9887255-0-3