Crisis

2010-07-08T17:52:00.001+01:00

Sorry this adress is not available anymore.You will find my website on this link

florie@floriesalnot.com
00 44 (0) 7 943 783 522

Crisis

2009-01-02T21:41:00.013Z

The aim of this blog

This is a work in progress blog of my 1st year project at the RCA. The brief "Crisis" was the one given to all my platform (Platform 10 with Daniel Charny and Roberto Feo as tutors) from which each of us had to define his own brief, his own area of exploration.

How it works?

Even though this is a blog, it doesn' t work exactly as usual. Each part should be read from the top to the bottom and not the opposite as it is usually the way to do it.

As I have started this blog only in January, I have summarized what I did from October to December in one part. From January, I am filling it regularly with my researches and my thoughts.

I have also created two other blogs dealing with my current projects:

-Culture Shopk: http://floriesalnot-cultureshopk.blogspot.com/

-the Saharawis Project: http://floriesalnot-saharawis.blogspot.com/

Definition of my brief

Since Octotber, I have been working on various themes dealing with crisis in order to refine my brief. Here is a short presentation of the major fields I have been successively focusing on:

January:

- Funeral ceremony for atheists

- Rites (eg. : funeral rites)
- Rites of passage (practices and behaviour that help us to cope with a development crisis)

November:

- Loss

October:

- The objects as a psychological support (eg.: transitional objects) to help us to better make it through a crisis. Example of crisis situation to focus on: death

- The processes of ageing and evolution applied to materials

Note: the picture presented at the top of the page is a poster Platform 10 RCA students had to create for the interim show. We had to choose a quotation relating to Crisis and illustrate it graphically.

comments and feedback

2009-01-02T21:39:00.001Z

january

2009-01-01T18:05:00.060Z

Beginning of January

My goal for this project about crisis

My goal would be to answer to the need of funeral rituals by participating in the motion of recreation of funeral rituals and by trying to provide different rituals. I will work on the post mortem collective rituals (I intend to work on the ritual of mourning and not on the ones of support of the sick person before dying) but also the personal ones, the ones practised in intimacy.

Research made during Christmas holidays

Collective funeral rituals

I divided my research of collective funeral rites into three categories: rituals for the future of the deceased, rituals to reassure and comfort the close family and rituals for the revitalization of the group (disrupted by the death of one of them). These three categories are actually the three goals of a rite defined by the ethnologist, Louis Vincent Thomas.The rites I quote here come from different cultures and different times. Of course, it is not exhaustive, I have selected the ones I thought could inspire me.

rituals for the future of the deceased

Rituals to accompany the deceased during the journey

Southeast Asia, parts of mainland China, the Kong Tiek ritual ceremony

For funeral, Chinese who follow the Daoïst religion buy paper and bamboo replicas of familiar objects, and display them in a ‘soule house’. They burn the replicas, releasing their spirit form to pass on to the next world. By doing this, the mourners hope to help from grateful ancestors, who continue to influence the well-being of their living relatives.

Funny and interesting article to look at:

http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/29651

Asia, the ritual of cremation

The smoke rising towards the sky symbolises the varnishing of the deceased towards the sky.

Masks and statues in Africa

The big statues representing the ancestors belong to the community, the priest keeps them, and they are only taken out for the ceremonies. In this situation, the villager meditates next to them and asks advice.The small statues are really important in the private house in which they are seen as protective objects.The masks are worn during sacrificial or exorcist ceremonies. The person wearing the mask is transformed by the strength of the ancestors that the mask permits to transmit.THOMAS L-V., Les chairs de la mort, Institution d’édition Sanofi, Paris, 2000, p168.

Rituals to prevent the spirits of the deceased to come back, (death represented by the deceased is seen as a threat for the livings)

Mali, ethincal group: Dogon

The funeral procession makes a lot of detours to go to the cemetery and to come back to the village. This is mainly to mislead the deceased and to prevent him from annoying the livings by coming back.

Côte d’Ivoire, ehnical group: Senufo

There is a destruction of the belongings of the deceased. It helps the livings to figure out that the person is dead and that the objects he used are no longer useful.It also makes the deceased aware that he has nothing to do with the livings anymore.

North Ghana, ritual Lua

Bow and arrows of the deceased are broken and fired.

THOMAS L-V., Les chairs de la mort, Institution d’édition Sanofi, Paris, 2000, p179-181

Rituals to reassurate the livings

The Furekuro, Senegal, ethnical group: Mandenka

The Furekuro is an oblong stone left on the grave over the head of the deceased. The day of the end of the grieving (the first anniversary of the death), the stone is brought back home where it becomes a holy stone which reminds to everybody that the deceased has become pure spirit.

THOMAS L-V., Les chairs de la mort, Institution d’édition Sanofi, Paris, 2000.

rituals to reassure and comfort the close family

Hoxosuxide in Africa (Benin, ethnic group: Fon)

This ritual gives a symbolic support to the mother who has just lost her child: a statuette representing him is given after the funerals; it’s on this substitute that’s going to be made the mourning. At a first stage, she becomes attached to it, feeds it and washes it. Steadily the principle of pleasure gives way to the principle of reality, the loss is acknowledged: from mother, the woman becomes priestess and venerates the statuette almost deified.

Cenotaphs, subitutes of the body when it’s not there

France, Ouessant island, Proëlla ritual

On the Ouessant island, the people who died in the sea and whom body wasn’t found afterwards, a small cross in wood or wax was used as a subsitute for the funerals.The community used to come in the house of the deceased and place a white tablecloth on the table, then on this tablecloth, they placed two folded napekinds. Where this napekinds would cross, they would place a small cross.This would be a substitue to the body of the deceased during the funerals. After the ceremony, the cross was placed with the other crosses in a special urn, in the church. once the urn is full, the crosses are brought in the cemetery, in a specific mausoleum.

http://www.ouessant.org/spip.php?article59

Rituals for grieving

Tanzania, ethnical group: Nyakusa

The funeral dance is a warrior dance. It seems that this behaviour is a way to express and, above all, to relieve some unbearable emotions.

The old garment, England, Orthodox Jew

All the closest relatives of the dead person should be gathered in the house of mourning, wearing some old garment- such as a jersey- from which a piece is ritually cut by an official of the burial group; this rent garment should be worn continuously during the seven days of intensive mourning.

GORER Geoffrey, Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain, The Cresset Press, London, 1965, p.73.

Mourning, England, Orthodox Jew

After the burial, the funeral party then returns to the house where the death has occurred (or occasionally to the house of a near relative). The closest relatives of the dead person sit on special low mourning stools (these can be borrowed from the synagogue) wearing their rent garment and special slippers without any leather in them. For the whole seven-day period the mourners should sit, thus dressed, on the low stools, unwashed and unshaven and the women without make up, from sunrise to sunset. They should move as little as possible and do not work at all.

GORER Geoffrey, Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain, The Cresset Press, London, 1965, p.74.

England, Orthodox Jew, mourning

The mourners are meant to do nothing and in theory only to eat the food that the visitors bring them.

GORER Geoffrey, Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain, The Cresset Press, London, 1965, p.74.

Mourning, England, Orthodox Jew

The visitors greet the mourners who either do not reply at all, or only very briefly. They then start talking to each mourner about the person they have lost.Testimony given by the wife of a business-man from the South-East, remembering the mourning for her mother:

‘It is amazing how these visits comfort you. They talk to youand start discussing the person you have lost: picture albums are brought out and everyone reminds you of a little episodes in their lives. Suddenly on laughts and enjoys those memories. One’s grief is lightened; it is a most healing and comforting week. Brothers and sisters who have drifter apart come togheter again and recall good memories. It is a comfort’

GORER Geoffrey, Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain, The Cresset Press, London, 1965, p.74-75.

Symbolisation of the death: Principle of reality.France, catholic contemporary ritual

The contemporary ritual of the candles is inspired by the one used during the Holy week in monasteries. During the holy Friday are read nine holy texts. A candelabrum for 9 candles is placed at the entrance of the choir. After each lecture, one of the candles is extinguished. The last one symbolised the death of the Christ.The contemporary ritual of the candles has been used, among other in 1996 during the whole time during which nobody had news from the seven French monks kidnapped in Algeria. Seven candles were lightening up at Notre Dame of Paris: these little candles were signifying the hope and also the fragility. Once their massacre announced, each candle went extinguished one by one in the silence.

Ghana, ethnical group: Ashanti,Zaïre, ethnical group: Iele

An Opening is made in the wall of the house. It shows that the deceased is not a living anymore and that he can use the classical door to leave a place.

The scarf, being hidden

rituals for the revitalization of the group (disrupted by the death of one of them)

Give a signification to the death, rituals to maintain alive the spirits of the deceased

Asê in Africa (Benin, ethnic group: Fon)The asê is made of a stem with a bulge in the middle. At the top, there is a metallic circle with pendants attached to it. On the metallic circle, moments of the ancestor’s life are represented.It seems that the stem represents a tree of life with the branches (pendants) as offspring of the bulge (seed).The âse is the expression of the belief that the deceased who are in the soil (from which the âse is coming from) continue to live through their descendants.By expressing the idea of continuity, the Asê becomes the symbol of the victory of the community over death indeed, the death of the individual is only an illusion.

Rituals in Mexique

Beginning of January

As I find very difficult to imagine a ceremony of death with humans, I chose to imagine one with animals. Here is the story of the death of a cat.

I have decided not to carry on straight away and try to answer some of my questions before:

20th of January 2009

1) One of the first question I had: Is it possible to create rites since rites are usually based on a certain tradition as well as beliefs?
With further lectures about the new creation of rituals of passage nowadays (funerals rituals but also rituals of birth etc) I had the answer to my problem as well as some examples of the kind of rituals which can be created.

Here is another type of answer:

“Puisant dans le stock limité des references symboliques et munis d’une structure relativement fixe, les rituels ne sont jamais “nouveaux”, ils sont réinventés sans cesse .”
« As the rituals own a structure relatively fixed and are drawing in the limited stock of the symbolic references, they are never new but constantly reinvented”.
Martine Segalen « Rites et rituels contemporains ». (Contemporary rites and rituals)

2)Then came the problem, closely related to the first one, to know if the rituals, once created, can be really adopted by people.

This question I have still not answered it completely yet.

3)Then, the question is to know if the speciality: Design Products, really permits to answer to my brief. First of all, it seems that design service would be maybe more adapted. However, design service can still end up on a product, so, this is not so much of a problem. Another problem is that a rite which needs a product to work will only be accessible to the people who can afford it...

The questions of the price will have to be considered in the design.

My goal for this project about crisis

I will try to answer the need of funeral rituals for atheists.

What I would like to achieve is recreate a ceremony for atheists.

New rites found during my visit at the British Museum
These are some Egyptian funeral rituals I discovered at the British museum.

21st of January

Something that I should keep in mind for that project :
Il n’y a pas culturellement “d’attitudes devant la mort », comme s’il devait s’agir de modèles, de réponses types. Mais des bribes de parole qui se risquent devant la bouche béante de la mort.
There is no cultural «behaviour in front of death », as models or perfect answer. There are only some snatches of speech which venture in the gaping mouth of the death.

Here is another quotation from Patrick Baudry from his book La place des morts (the place of dead persons) that I find interesting ( I translate only the beginning since I do not succeed to understand the rest of the sentence. This sociologist has got the particularity to write incomprehensible things….):
Ce qu’énonce toute culture avec sa propre organisation fictionnelle, c’est que la vie n’est vivante qu’à la condition de composer avec une dimension de la mort qui rend à la mort elle-même son double marquage dans l’existence : à la fois visible et presque palpable dans la fragilité de la vie et invisible, radicalement inconnue, mais se tenant comme l’ombre dans la lumière.
What is expounded by any culture and its ritual organisation is that the life is alive only if it compromises with a dimension of the death….

The different phases in mourning by Geoffrey Gorer:

1) A short period of shock, usually lasting between the occurrence of death and the disposal of the body.
2) A period of intense mourning accompanied by the withdrawal of much attention
and affect from the external world and by such physiological changes as disturbed and restless
sleep, often with vivd dreams, failure of appetite and loss of weight.
3) A final period of re-established physical homeostasis-sleep and weight again
stabilized and interest again directed outward.

GORER Geoffrey, Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain, The Cresset Press, London, 1965, p.112.

Monday 26th of January

Randomly, I find some interesting projects about mourning and keeping life after death on the blog "We make money no art". Here are the links of the article and the links of other projects quoted in the article:

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/01/just-as-the-web.php
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2004/11/-biopresence-by.php
http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/people/alumni/05-07/michael-burton/projects/project1.html
http://www.dziga.com/hyman-victor/
http://www.michelegauler.net/projects/digitalremains

Thursday 29th of January

I want to shape some objects out of paper. The idea, at this point, is to make them fly. What I would like is to create a ritual of separation through the separation of the belongings of the deceased.
For that, I got inspired by two rituals (see above), the one from Afrika in which people destroy the belongings of the deceased (the arrow and the bow are broken), and the one from Asia in which objects are made out of paper in order to accompany the deceased in his journey. These objects are burnt after the cremation of the deceased.

I make my first trials with some Plastic/ Paper such as Polyart and Tyvek. I first try to shape my object by heating the sheets of paper directly onto the objects. It doesn't work but the effects obtained are very nice.

Then, I try to vacuum form them. Polyart (right side) works much better than Tyvek.

Therefore, I carry on my trials with the Polyart paper.

february

2009-01-01T18:02:00.009Z

2nd of Februrary

I'm carrying on with my trials with the mdf.
I tried to make one trial using the leftovers of MDF found in the bins of the workshop.I filled my metalic tube with some small pieces of different sizes.

Pictures after the swelling process.

I am a bit disappointed. My moulds seem too small for this technique of recycling of small pieces of MDF. The gaps remaining even after the swelling process are too big and the shape of the cylinder is not really recognizable anymore. I have to try with a much bigger mould.

Another problem is that the pieces of wood cannot be really glued together before the swelling process and have to be glued afterward. For that, I tryed to pour onto the dry piece (still in the mould) a solution of PVA glue and water. It worked quite well. I will also have to try to pour some resin into it to fill the gaps and to glue everything together.

I made a trial trying to check how the swelling process can enable to print into the MDF.

As I wanted to check if the shape taken by the MDF could be more complex than a plain cylinder, I tried to add to the first mould a bigger diameter at one end. Here is the mould.

The result seems quite convincing but it is still difficult to say, the mould is too small and not complex enough to judge.

In order to avoid using any kind of glue or resign, I tried to make a joint (assemblage) with the different pieces of MDF.
I wanted to check if the swelling process could permit to make the assemblage stronger.

The result is a bit disappointing, the joints are weakers than they were. Finally, I realised that this is due to the fact that the mdf was not put in the right way. It should work if I do the joints differently.

With one of my trials I realise something I hadn't realised before: the MDF shrinks when it dries, even if it keeps the shape. On this example you can see the mould in plastic much larger than the MDF pieces.

I have made a bigger and more complicated mould; the mould of a plastic bottle.

Below is the type of assemblage I used for the different parts of MDF

Tutorial with Gareth William, 19th February 2009-02-19

Funeral rituals project:
References to have a look at: Jane Goodie
Maybe ask the welcome collection about the reception of their photographic exhibition about death.

The whole process of death has to be brought back to life.

For the new rituals: maybe use new techniques and their advantages.
(for example, the new techniques can permit to make things quickly (rapid prototyping) , it can be an advantage in the ceremonies after death).

You should look at new types of objects and go away from the conventional symbols.

Saharawis project:
Reference to have a look at:
“Persistence of craft”
What is nice about the Saharawis project is that it is a way to empower people.

Tells me that what he feels about my projects is the predominance of “sense of importance of human dignity”(not pride). It’s about preserving human dignity, sense of humanity. Sometimes, it can be lost, can design bring that back?

This last point I think helps me a lot for my dissertation topic. It gives me nice key words.

october/ december

2009-01-01T06:00:00.036Z

How I have started
When I started my research about crisis I decided to explore the area of psychology. I was looking for objects which can help us in crisis situations by being utilized as a psychological support, for example:

- Soft toys (the transitional objects described by Winnicott)

- Dolls

Some dolls can give some psychological support to children who have a physical disability or family issues. In this case, they are used for role playing and storytelling.

Another interesting kind of doll I have found is the Fon statuette. It is linked with the Hoxosuxide ritual of the Fons (an ehtnic group from Benin) for mothers who have lost their baby. After her baby's funeral, the mother receives a little statuette. The whole mourning process she is going to go through is then based on the statuette. The mother starts feeding it, washing it and steadily taking care of it somehow as if it were her own child. After some time has passed and thanks to the coercion of her relatives, she steadily stops considering the statuette as her child and tends more and more to deify and venerate it. What Sigmund Freud called the principle of pleasure (the step of the mourning process before the acceptance of death) gives way to the principle of reality (when death is accepted) and the mother eventually acknowledges the loss of her baby.
(THOMAS L-V., Rites de mort. Pour la paix des vivants, Fayard, Paris, 1985)

The Fon statuette really made a great impression on me because of the ritual process this object would initiate to respond to the crisis of loss. However, I have not carried on researching on loss and the rituals related to it straight away. I decided to research on something more general: the loss of someone.

Therefore I made a map of concepts related to death. From that map, I started to look in the area of ageing, changing and evolving that I have put in red on the map (at that point I was a bit unsure, that is why I did not choose to explore the area of the rites. However I have come back to it a bit later)

I also made a map of design projects dealing with death, funeral rituals and mourning. At that point, as we had a workshop on risk management, I chose to analyse and classify my references with the technique and words used in risk management.

For more references, here is an interesting link about an exhibition called "post mortem" held in Milan in 2006 with the work of the students of the design Academy of Eindhoven.
http://www.sharedutchdesign.nl/milan/2006/index.htm

Here are some of the first experiments I made about ageing and evolution. By experiencemting, I was trying to emphasize these processes of ageing and evolution in materials. I started with natural materials and carried on with more artificial ones (I only put the images of some of them).
My goal at that stage was to experience with materials in order to use them, afterwards, in objects that would evolve over time.

I also made some experiments with MDF, trying to see how it could grow overtime in contact with water. On the left is the piece at it was at the beginning, on the right is the result.

I also experienced with paper. The change which occurs over time in this trial is very quick (it took around 8 minutes to happen).

After the presentation of my research and experiments to my tutors, I was told to come back on the concept of death with which I had started. I was told to define more precisely what I wanted to do in this area and what I was interested in.

Design Writting:

In the meantime, I got interested in the Wabi sabi japanese aesthetic that I found really relevant with the experiments I was just doing on evolution of materials.

As we had to write a little text for the design writing course, in order to make a booklet, I decided to write on the Wabi sabi aesthetic:

Here is my text:

Slow down, look around you, release control and accept things as they are
When asked what wabi-sabi is, most Japanese will shake their head, hesitate and offer a few apologetic words about how difficult it is to explain.

In his short book entitled Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Leonard Koren explains that the reason for this difficulty to explain what wabi-sabi is, even for Japanese people, is that there are hardly any books neither teachings of it. Indeed, wabi-sabi implies an intuitive worldview in contradiction with any rational worldview, and is therefore, not easy to sum up in a textbook.
This aesthetic of Wabi Sabi which can also be, in its fullest expression, a way of life has retained my attention because it proposes a apprehension of the things around us which is miles away from the one we usually have in Western societies. Moreover, this apprehension of the world responds quite well to my personal researches on loss, ageing and death.

Whereas Western societies and cultures believe in progress and technology, wabi-sabi is characterized by the fundamental uncontrollability of nature. Wabi sabi is about acceptance and appreciation of nature. It accepts the functioning of the universe where everything is in constant motion, evolving from or devolving towards nothingness. Consequently, nothing is ever complete or perfect and Wabi sabi appreciates this aesthetic of the crude, the corrosion and the contamination. As an aesthetic, Wabi sabi also appreciates looking at the hidden things and getting interest in the ugliness: “to experience wabi-sabi means you have to slow way down, be patient, and look very closely.”
All these ideas about an acceptance of the universe are linked with Buddhism which meditates on impermanence. These meditation are a traditional Buddhist antidote to craving and attachment and therefore to the fear of death and the will to struggle against it. You can really only hope to control and possess something which is unchanging. If life is chameleon, then ultimately it is ungraspable.
Could we, Westerners, by the loan of this Wabi Sabi aesthetic on impermanence, be helped to accept more easily the natural order of things?
It will certainly not lead us to the point where we can live our life more lightly and can seize death as a spiritual opportunity, but it will be a good start just to help Westerners to start considering death as something natural, part of life. It will alleviate therefore, a huge amount of suffering.

New brief:Just after this presentation, we were asked to make a table for the interim show at school. This table should have one leg and this leg should embody our concept. The idea was then to link all the tables together and to present our projects and experiments onto it.

At that stage, as I wasn't sure anymore what my concept was (death?; loss?; rituals?), I was a bit confused. I finally decided to build a table that would die over the time of the exhibition (one week and a half). I had few ideas but I finally decided to make a table that people would interract with and would make it die steadily.

I made a table out of separated square pieces of wood and asked people to take one of them. To encourage them to do so I thought each piece of wood could be one of my business card. Each time people would want to take a business card, they would participate in the process of dying of the table. However, as the point of the exhibition was not really to make contacts, I finally changed my mind.
I choosed thre quotations linked with my project wich are:

Things are either devolving towards, or evolving from, nothingness.

While te universe destructs it also constructs.

New things emerge out of nothingness

Leonard Koren, from his book Wabi sabi: for artists, designers, poets and philosophers.

Onto some of the pieces, I wrote a word of the quotation and left a note for visitors, asking them to participate in the reconstruction of the quotation on the poster by picking a piece from the table.

Table Instructions:
1) Please take one of the leg’s pieces:
(Warning: be aware that by taking a piece of the leg, you make its life shorter.)
2) Check if a word and a number are written on the piece you have taken.
3) If yes, take a piece of tape and use it to stick the piece of wood on the appropriate place on the poster to reconstruct the quotation.

The table did not completely work as I was expecting it. Indeed, it was suppose to fall completely in the end. However as the table top was not well fixed to the table, it did not carry along with it the whole leg. But it still ends up with a nice aesthetic of crisis.

http://www.wallpaper.com/newgallery/17050734/21

New brief: Two weeks to produce an object following the theme of our crisis.

Research: The five main losses
As I was still unsure what my main focus was, I decided to explore the area of loss.
I found out that a human being throughout his life has to deal with five main losses:

-the losses of personal objects
-the losses linked to the self esteem, the self image (illness/ handicap; unemployment/ retirement).
-the losses linked to one’s belief, hope… (ambitions, ideals…)
-the losses of loved persons (departure; death)
-the losses linked with the development.
Since the day he was born to the moment he dies, the human being has to support and overcome different bereavements due to different losses. He has to renounce to different things:

renunciation of the maternal symbiosis
renunciation of the state of child;
for the couple, renunciation of the ideal child
renunciation of the child who becomes adult
renunciation of the youth
renunciation of the parents (the protectors they were become protégés)

Losses and rituals
I became particularly interested in these last main losses, the losses linked with the development, because of their link with rituals. As these big losses are universal and difficult to overcome (each stage of the development requires an important psychic reorganization to reach the next stage), “rites of passage” (concept defined by Van Gennep) can be practised to cope with them. The rites of passage are social practices that aim to limit the individual difficulty that each one has to cope with during a loss and to replace it as a universal emotion and issue. Rites of passages help to stop the flow of time for a while in order to accept the loss and the new situation. However, even though rituals are necessary, they are more and more forgotten by our society and tend to disappear.This made me come back on the interest I had at the beginning on the topic of death.

Our relationship to death

I read different texts (wrote during the 70’) stating that death is a topic which puts people in a awkward position and that is tried to be avoided.
They state three main problems:
-dying becomes a technical problem which happens in the hospital (the medicalized death) which brings a distance between the dying person and the family.
-the simplification (or retraction) of the funeral rituals, linked with a certain disappearance of the religious beliefs and the development of individualism, provokes a tendency to forget the deceases. (BAUDRY P., La place des morts, enjeux et rites, L'harmattan, Paris, 1999.).

Here is the statement made by Louis-Vincent Thomas at the end of his book (rites of death):

“A familiarity with death should be recreated, that is to say, we should put a stop to the denial of death on which is based our way of life […] Meanwhile we change the words, two things can be changed about the funeral structures: the invention of a system of symbols in reference with the modern techniques and the re-socialisation of the funerals. The funerary ritual of the future will only fulfil its function as a therapy on these two conditions”.

The funeral rituals
I became particularly interested by the funeral rituals rather than other types of rituals for different reasons:
First of all because the loss of a person through death is certainly the most difficult loss to overcome and rituals are particularly needed in these situations. Indeed, funeral rituals, even if they have been discarded a bit few years ago (hence the statements just quoted above, made during the 70'), have never completely disappeared. Now, there is even a new lease of interest for rituals. However, are the old rites are often not adapted anymore (one of the reason why they were discarded) people have a tendency to change them, to reinvent them.

So, here are the problems with funeral rituals nowadays:

-Most of the time, funeral rituals that exist are not adapted anymore. They are not adapted for atheists for example (rites, most of the time, come from religions, there aren’t a lot of laic rituals), and they are not anymore adapted to our contemporary mentality and way of living (ex: most of the time, people dye in hospital, as a consequence, the veillée funèbre is not possible anymore).

-Individual tentative to recreate rituals can have some bad consequences. (ex....)

Given all of these facts I decided to propose my own answer to the problem.

At this stage, I really did not know how I would do that but with all my research about the new way to cope with death and the new kinds of funeral rituals, I found out interesting things about cremation and decided to focus on it for the two weeks project I had to hand in at the beginning of December.

As I'm french, I knew that in my country, cremation (which is not the main practice to dispose of a body) usually leads to complains: people find it too brutal and difficult to accept. They complain about the difficulty to see the coffin going into the flames, to see the process of burning. The explanation of this difficulty with cremation is mainly due to the fact that there is no rituals practised around it to help the people to cope with the situation. However, in England, where cremation is much more common, there is a much more established way to deal with it: there is a ceremony and people don't seem to complain. After a ceremony of farewell, people see the coffin varnishing symbolically behind curtains. The mourners do not deal at all with the burning process which is done later withouth them being present.

Then, during my research, I found this very interesting article:

http://fwbo.org/articles/cremation_ground.html

This is from a man who has been to a buddhist monastry and who attended a cremation there. In his text he explains the difference there is with the ceremony around cremation in England By doing that, he is raising the another problem there is in the way we're dealing with cremation in Europe: we just do not want to be confronted to it. If this one is maybe not making the mourning of the deceased more difficult (I don't know...) at least, it does not help in the problem of non acceptance of death as a natural process in our society.

So, I found this remark interestant and I thought that it could be interesting to develop an object that would remind, at least symbolically, this hidden process of cremation. As the cremation last more or less one hour and a half, I tried to develop something that would last this long.

I did experience with paper. I try to see how I could burn it:

More than being a good way for the time requirement, I found this solution interesting as it also permit, by the burning process, to draw something (first sequence of the video) or cut a shape (second sequence of the video). The object would remind the process of cremation and, on the other hand would not end up leaving an idea of destruction.

I experienced with paper by making a structure out of it, a structure which would destroy, dye in one hour and a half. Some of the trials where successful, some did not work at all.

The object I proposed in the end was an object in two parts; one part which is left with the body before cremation, the other which is kept.

Once the funeral ceremony finished, at home, the mourner can commemorate the burning process thanks to this object. The structure of paper kept will disappear like the one left with the deceased.

As I was thinking that it would be dificult for the person to see disappear everything from the object, I tried to find a way to leave a trace.
Personnal critics about this project
With the research I did afterwards (see the January part), I think that the intimacy object is maybe not the solution. Indeed, I discovered through my research that this is the situation people are tending to: mourn on their own, mourn in the intimacy and this is maybe not the right solution. People need collective rites to mourn and to support the grief they are facing. I think this object should imply a collective ritual and should be better adapted for that.

New research

While I was working on this project I also carried on a bit with the mdf trials I had started in October. I tried to see how I could use the property of the mdf to expand in order to mould shapes with it.

I started with a really simple way: I cut 45° pieces in a board and made a parallelepiped. I put it in a tube and made it expand.

Although I was wishing something more perfect (the cylinder obtained was not completely full of mdf) I found it satisfying and interesting because of the particular aesthetic obtained.

Here is another trial I made with a tube and two strings.

Before further development I would like to see how easily the results can be fixed. Indeed, they tend to crumble a bit once dry.

bibliography

2008-12-31T18:12:00.006Z

BACQUE M-F., et al. , Mourir aujourd’hui, les nouveaux rites funéraires, Odile Jacob, Paris 1997.
BACQUE M-F., Apprivoiser la mort, psychologie du deuil et de la perte, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2002.
FELLOUS Michèle, A la recherche de nouveaux rites, rites de passage et modernité avancée, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2001.
GORER G., Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain, The Cresset Press, London, 1965.
HUNTINGTON R., METCALF P?, Celebrations of death, the anthropology of mortuary ritual, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979.
SEGALEN M., Rites et rituels contemporains, Nathan, Paris, 2002.
THOMAS L-V., Rites de mort. Pour la paix des vivants, Fayard, Paris, 1985.
THOMAS L-V., Les chairs de la mort, Institution d’édition Sanofi, Paris, 2000.
URBAIN J-D., L’archipel des morts, cimetières et mémoire en Occident, Payot et Rivas, Paris, 2005.