Corpus Terrae

Abstract

Corpus Terrae has become an exploration of a possible future scenario where body composting becomes a commonly practiced burial method. Our installation builds upon three forms of speculative artifacts from this imagined future.

The first artifact is a graphic banner, tracing the history of this future over seven generations, beginning in 2025. The Earth becomes engulfed in heavy warfare, leaving a small population within Europe to rebuild themselves, in the midst of dealing with the immense presence of death around them. This is the initial event in which the method of human composting becomes favored, a quick way to pay tribute to bodies in burial, without the need for an excessive amount of materials. The population grows, becomes more established, and goes through multiple shifts in the societal framework and power structures. The core of our future is the replacement of traditional monetary wealth and ownership with community trust and reciprocal sharing, specifically in the relationship between soil (land) and the humans utilizing it. Human composting is a method of replenishing unhealthy soil, a way to return the nutrients from our bodies to the Earth. With this future, we recognize human bodies as valuable resources, and integrate this framework into a greater societal model.

The second artifact, Seven Letters of Grief, serves as a human thread running through the speculative framework of our future. Each letter is written by an character living within a different generation of this society. These personal written pieces anchor the societal shifts in an emotional experience. The letters are tracing the transformation of grief across time as the act of dying—and the way we remember the dead—is culturally and materially reshaped. Each letter expresses a dominant stage of grief, with hints of other stages, acknowledging that grieving is rarely linear. The writer of each letter isn’t just grieving a loved one—they are often mourning the tradition, or the narrative that surrounded that person’s death. Early letters grapple with discomfort and traditional gaps around composting, while later ones show reverence, normalization, and a sense of identity within the process. The letters articulate that changes in remembrance processes do not erase human vulnerability, and that even in futures shaped by change, the longing to remember — and to be remembered — persists.

The last artifact we chose to materialize is the Soil Portrait - an ambient sound and moving image piece that memorializes a loved one. Meant to be placed in the home, the Soil Portrait is rooted in modern soil chromatography, an qualitative method of analyzing soil health using photochemistry. This method of soil analysis creates radial images, visualizing information such as total carbon content, levels of organic matter, presence of certain minerals in the soil, etc. In our imagined future, the grafter, a speculative figure who manages the human decomposition process and grieving rituals, creates these soil chromatographies of the passed person once fully transformed into soil. This is a way of memorializing the person, while also representing the transformation they have undergone. It portrays them as both human and non-human. We added a technological layer of translating these soil chromatography images into sound, to increase the ambient nature of interaction with the piece, as an object placed in the home. The emotional relationship with this artifact is reflected in the letters of grief, showing how the societal taboo around alternate forms of burial, remembrance, and the discomfort with human composting shifts over time.

With this scenario sketch, we are trying to provoke an ethical debate on human composting, encouraging policymakers to consider implications of alternative burial methods and the handling of human remains in sustainable ways, especially because this method is still illegal in certain places. At the same time, we are trying to broaden our perspective and see humans as a source of nutrients, challenging anthropocentric views, as well as pulling Men out of the Men/Nature dichotomy. There is an emphasis on the cultural adaptation surrounding grief, because shifts in societal norms are emotionally and culturally loaded. The emotional landscapes surrounding death practices have to be

acknowledged to make a cultural shift towards a sustainable solution possible. With the depiction of new forms of remembrance, we are trying to give a frame to consider how death care might be supported. Corpus Terrae actively is searching for answers on the questions: What regulations or societal shifts would support human composting and how do we foster cultural acceptance of new burial methods?