How to Read this Text
This text accompanies a collection of approximately 13,000 photographs of burial sites taken between 2012 and 2020. These images are organized into a multivolume book, Burial Sites. This is a project about burial sites and how they embody the entanglements of life and death.
How does one even begin to develop an organizational tactic addressing the enormity of this subject?
I work with text and image as forms that both contain and expand the infinite questions of this project. This writing is divided into many short segments that function almost like miniature essays. They can be read alongside the photographs, prompting questions to consider while wandering through the spreads of images. They can also be pulled apart from the larger form and engaged with as fragments. Or, finally, this text can read in sequence as an entirely separate work.
There is so much unknown about death, yet it is what we all share. Because this topic does not prompt definite conclusions, this text becomes an extended introduction for an unfished and unfinishable project. Each fragment of writing is another beginning that attempts to grapple with more questions, an opening for more openings.
Throughout this text I refer to the ideas of various thinkers who have informed the way I have navigated this project. Almost all these references take on an interdisciplinary stance. I bridge the thoughts of artists, art critics, poets, philosophers, sociologists, and scientists, weaving them into my encounters with death. Each of the people I reference are complex and nuanced scholars who cross disciplines within their own work, usually using the humanities as a home base. If you were to search these author’s names on the internet, you would find that they have multiple identities listed in their biographies. I feel connected to these writers as an artist who also sits between many disciplines and feels compelled to remain unbound by any one way of thinking. There is much to be learned from each other.
I am interested in how notetaking, annotation, and other acts of revision continually complicate the role of the archive or encyclopedia as a definitive record. The appendix sections of this document become a parallel text providing small personal vignettes originating from my fieldnotes and journal entries. Through language, they provide a first-hand account of my embodied experiences. Their role is to locate and contextualize what cannot be held within the confines of the photographs.
I invite readers to navigate this project as a spatial object. When installed in a gallery space for public viewing, the volumes of photobooks are all laid open and spread out on a long table. Readers walk around the table, moving from one spread to another, perhaps picking up where previous visitors left off. In a less formal or private setting, I imagine a reader might similarly flip through multiple volumes at once, transferring their attention between text, image, and so on. This form of meandered reading becomes its own form of traveling, exploration, and discovery. There is no correct way to enter this project and it can work as a springboard for other conversations. The most exciting thing to me are stories and references that others bring forward when engaging with the project. When sharing my work, I almost always end up not talking about my experiences in these sites but hearing those belonging to others. People also often send me references and links to works made by other scholars, artists, and authors. These are ways I see the project expanding and this introduction of introductions continuing.
Finally, this project is made by an artist. This project borrows many ways of thinking and methodological strategies, but I am not an anthropologist, sociologist, philosopher, historian, journalist, or ethnographer. Burial Sites is an artwork
This text accompanies a collection of approximately 13,000 photographs of burial sites taken between 2012 and 2020. These images are organized into a multivolume book, Burial Sites. This is a project about burial sites and how they embody the entanglements of life and death.
How does one even begin to develop an organizational tactic addressing the enormity of this subject?
I work with text and image as forms that both contain and expand the infinite questions of this project. This writing is divided into many short segments that function almost like miniature essays. They can be read alongside the photographs, prompting questions to consider while wandering through the spreads of images. They can also be pulled apart from the larger form and engaged with as fragments. Or, finally, this text can read in sequence as an entirely separate work.
There is so much unknown about death, yet it is what we all share. Because this topic does not prompt definite conclusions, this text becomes an extended introduction for an unfished and unfinishable project. Each fragment of writing is another beginning that attempts to grapple with more questions, an opening for more openings.
Throughout this text I refer to the ideas of various thinkers who have informed the way I have navigated this project. Almost all these references take on an interdisciplinary stance. I bridge the thoughts of artists, art critics, poets, philosophers, sociologists, and scientists, weaving them into my encounters with death. Each of the people I reference are complex and nuanced scholars who cross disciplines within their own work, usually using the humanities as a home base. If you were to search these author’s names on the internet, you would find that they have multiple identities listed in their biographies. I feel connected to these writers as an artist who also sits between many disciplines and feels compelled to remain unbound by any one way of thinking. There is much to be learned from each other.
I am interested in how notetaking, annotation, and other acts of revision continually complicate the role of the archive or encyclopedia as a definitive record. The appendix sections of this document become a parallel text providing small personal vignettes originating from my fieldnotes and journal entries. Through language, they provide a first-hand account of my embodied experiences. Their role is to locate and contextualize what cannot be held within the confines of the photographs.
I invite readers to navigate this project as a spatial object. When installed in a gallery space for public viewing, the volumes of photobooks are all laid open and spread out on a long table. Readers walk around the table, moving from one spread to another, perhaps picking up where previous visitors left off. In a less formal or private setting, I imagine a reader might similarly flip through multiple volumes at once, transferring their attention between text, image, and so on. This form of meandered reading becomes its own form of traveling, exploration, and discovery. There is no correct way to enter this project and it can work as a springboard for other conversations. The most exciting thing to me are stories and references that others bring forward when engaging with the project. When sharing my work, I almost always end up not talking about my experiences in these sites but hearing those belonging to others. People also often send me references and links to works made by other scholars, artists, and authors. These are ways I see the project expanding and this introduction of introductions continuing.
Finally, this project is made by an artist. This project borrows many ways of thinking and methodological strategies, but I am not an anthropologist, sociologist, philosopher, historian, journalist, or ethnographer. Burial Sites is an artwork