CRITICAL ESSAY

Exert from “A Natural History of Urns” by Riccardo Venturi

“CONSERVATORIES

Three kilos of ash or thereabouts, a fine powder, smoothly pulverised without any bone residue. This is what a cinerary urn contains. This is what remains of our body after cremation: an incombustible residue that might come from a bonfire once the party has died down. But a label bearing biographical details reminds us that there is in fact a human being inside. The remains are encased twice: there is an inner container holding the ashes, sometimes a simple plastic bag, and an outer container generally of a more precious material. The design is reminiscent of a miniature coffin. The inner contents are hermetically sealed, fire-welded or cold-welded, while the outer one bolted or sealed tightly, so the ashes cannot be accidentally or deliberately scattered, and so there is no infiltration of air or moisture. The ashes are placed in the urn for storage, not unlike any other form of burial. The pulverised corpse thus lies inside the urn, which is hermetically sealed. Like the entire cremation procedure, a sealing that is subject to legislation and to the control of the mortuary police, which prohibits the scattering of ashes as well as their splitting up to be kept in different places or among different people.(Cf. Come costruire un’urna cineraria, 22 August 2007, https://www.funerali.org/cimiteri/come-costruire-unurna-cineraria-530.html.)

“To be human means above all to bury,” writes Robert Pogue Harrison in The Dominion of the Dead.(Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003.) For this reason it is hard to believe that the void left by the disappearance of a human being might be filled by this process and by these norms which would appear to turn our final resting place into a strongbox. Might death as a measure of the living and the condition of existence lie in that pile of ashes? Might our last words be the ones on urns, those memory boxes that the English philosopher Thomas Browne referred to as ‘conservatories’ in Hydriotaphia. Urne-Buriall (1658)? (Cf. Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Hamish Hamilton, 2019.)

HUMUS

Walking around the Pincian Hill and Villa Borghese, the Austrian writer Robert Musil noticed some sarcophagi hidden among the undergrowth. What attracted his attention was the one portraying a couple lying along the cover. The fact that it was placed in the open air in such an idyllic context made the experience unique: “One sees many such sarcophagus covers in Rome; but in no museum and in no church do they make an impression as here, under the trees, where as though on a picnic the figures stretch themselves out and just seem to have awakened from a little sleep that lasted two thousand years.” Bodies and smiles conserved in stone in the shade of the boughs until today: “This faithful, proper, middle-class beloved look has lasted for centuries; it was sent forth in Ancient Rome and crosses your glance today.”(Robert Musil, “Sarcophagus Covers,” in Flypaper, Penguin UK, 2013.)

In this historical parable, we may make out the cultural history of urns and burials, one which coincides with the history of human society and, in part, with the history – or at least with the mythical origins – of architecture. It is in fact difficult to think of architecture without the funerary function it served in ancient civilisations and which takes the form of pyramids or majestic temples erected around a human corpse. Before being a geometric figure, the pyramid is a dwelling that hosts a mummy, that of a renowned cadaver waiting to reach immortality. Two distant temporalities – that of the flesh and that of the stone – in which an attempt is made to perennialise the caducity of our own bodies and of our existence.

As Jacques Derrida wrote: “One must go further: culture itself, culture in general, is essentially, before anything, even a priori, the culture of death. Consequently, then, it is a history of death. There is no culture without a cult of ancestors, a ritualization of mourning and sacrifice, institutional places and modes of burial, even if they are only for the ashes of incineration. […] The very concept of culture may seem to be synonymous with the culture of death, as if the expression ‘culture of death’ were ultimately a pleonasm or a tautology.”(Jacques Derrida, Aporias, Stanford University Press, 1993.)

But we could go back to Giambattista Vico when he suggests humanitas derives from humando, to bury, burial, thus linking it to the humus of the ground. Or to the Greek thought according to which in scientific and not empirical (episteme) knowledge, the echo of the funerary cippus (epistema) could be heard. (Mario Porro, Ipotiposi. Vagabondare per immagini, with illustrations by Anna Enrica Passoni, Medusa, Milan 2020, p. 72.)

“Buried within ‘grave’ are four distinct meanings: gravity, the mysterious physical force that draws all things down to the core of the earth; gravitas, the Roman word for weighty seriousness; the grave of the cemetery, where the body is laid to final rest; and gravid, pregnant,”(James Hillman, The Force of Character: and the Lasting Life, Ballentine 2000.) as James Hillman writes in The Force of Character, the nicest book I have ever read on ageing. Should not the same gravitas be attributed to urns?”

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HISTORICAL ESSAY

Exert from “The urn is dead! Long live the urn!” by Cecilia Casabona

“DESIGNING DEATH

By designing, humans tirelessly redesign themselves - especially when it comes to matters related to death. Designing for death - to deploy technological and cultural resources in rituals and artefacts that celebrate and honour the dead - can be reasonably argued to be a uniquely human trait. Over the last two centuries, a rich collection of material culture has been exhumed and studied to learn more about the human tendency to produce symbolic objects that define their presence and meaning in history. This anthropological investigation has made me question the role that humans play in the world. By rethinking our relationship with death through objects, is it possible to imagine a way of redesigning human life while designing for the dead? 

“To be human means above all to bury”. (R. P. Harrison, The Dominion of the Death, 2005.)

To this day, archaeologists interpret the life of ancient civilisations - their social, political, and cultural structures - through the examination of burial sites, the practices and rituals for the dead, and the objects accompanying them. Indeed, funerals usually involve rituals through which the deceased receives their final disposition. Depending on the culture or religion, these may involve either the destruction of the body (e.g. by cremation or sky burial) or its preservation (e.g. by mummification or burial). In nearly all of these scenarios, the funerary designed objects seem to almost play the role of protagonists, acting as spokespeople and witnesses of entire populations. The design of death is constantly evolving, from the nomadic hunter-gatherers who devised burials and funerary objects 100,000 years ago to the contemporary material designer who develops coffins that turn corpses into mushrooms with the highly-designed intention to make any human trace disappear - each era has its own historical awareness and priorities. 

Throughout the course of human history, although this isn’t a strictly human characteristic, the dead have always influenced the manners of the living and exercised a certain control over their remembrance, starting with the symbolic and/or functional objects that become mediators in a far from silent dialogue. These artefacts and monuments, that stand as marks and extensions of the bodies, are informed with “biographies” and acquire forms of agency: 

“the dead body can be conceptualised as a node in a nexus of social relationships, objects and exchanges through which personhood and remembrance are distributed and constituted.” (H. Williams, Death warmed up. The Agency of Bodies and Bones in Early Anglo-Saxon Cremation Rites, 2004.)

The dead body, in fact, exercises agency through the rituality of its final disposition - burial, cremation, or exposure - to the extent of it acting both as “a technology of enchantment” and “a technology of remembrance”.(ivi, 2004 )

Today, one might think that traditional burial is the most common and historical method of disposition; however, cremation actually has an even more ancient history. Cremation dates back at least 17,000 years with the Mungo Lady, the remains of a partially cremated body found at Lake Mungo, Australia. However, scholars seem to agree that cremation became widespread during the early Stone Age, most likely in Europe and the Near East. Cremation consists in the burning of the human body until all of its soft parts are destroyed by fire. The skeletal remains and ash residue often become the object of religious rites and are stored inside vessels or vases, also known as cinerary urns, that throughout history have acquired different shapes and meanings according to the cultures that designed them. A collective understanding of the urn’s history and symbolic value lies embedded subliminally in our history as humans beyond the human. Furthermore, the investigation of the traditional urn encourages and prompts our acceptance of new designs, not only when it comes to new symbolic artefacts but also the idea of “new” humans. ”

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