Memento Mori: On Discounting, Discarding & Displaying Remains

The sisters conclude their death and spectacle series with further thoughts on the dead deprived of commemoration. From the repository of graves on New York City’s Hart Island to the erasure of historic Black cemeteries in the American South, they explore the ways in which human remains are stratified, relegated and discarded in ways that lay bare the injustice of life.

Or, in the case of Body Worlds, forever plastinated and displayed for public view—without their owners’ consent—in what Edward Rothstein described as an act of “aestheticized grotesqueness.” What makes certain land and bodies sacred (or literally, saintly) while rendering others disposable? What can the living learn from the politics of remembering and forgetting remains? 

Sources cited include Joan Didion’s South and West, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Eliza Franklin’s Lost Legacy Project for the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, Susan Sontag's "On Photography," the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, Jacqueline Goldsby’s A Spectacular Secret, Dorothea Lange’s 1956 photographs of California's Berryessa Valley, Marita Sturkin’s “The Aesthetics of Absence,” Seth Freed Wessler’s 2022 ProPublica investigation “How Authorities Erased a Historical Black Cemetery in Virginia,” Robert McFarlane’s 2019 New Yorker piece “The Invisible City Beneath Paris,” Melinda Hunt’s Hart Island Project (www.hartisland.net), Nina Bernstein’s 2016 New York Times piece “Unearthing the Secrets of New York’s Mass Graves,” “Young Ruin” from 99% Invisible, and NPR’s 2006 reporting on ethical concerns over Body Worlds.

Cover photo of Hart Island's common trench burials is by Jacob Riis, 1890.