Project Description
As a response to a policy banning traditional mountain tombs, the project reimagines a sustainable memorial ritual for our future. The site is to be found along an existing mountain path, connecting traditional mountain tombs dotted across a valley next to Wenzhou-Kean University. The project conceives of this path as a journey through time; passing and connecting memorial rituals of the past, present and future. Answering a policy pressure for the conservation of space, the act of burial is reimagined though a use of Resomation and DNA data storage technology— the body is returned to nature through resomation, and burial becomes the act of DNA storage, memorialising the deceased into ‘Star Tombs’. The project includes a funeral building and a memorial park, under which mourners experience a path of light to arrive at a funeral, and from above, the memorial park is a highly dense landscaped field of ‘stars’, each one placed by a family as part of a new ritual of burial