2025-2026 COOP study group ~ Cemeterial Ecologies, Grieving and Zombie Time
Tutor team:
Guests:
Nissa Nishikawa
Partner Institution:
Student participants:
Agnese Krivade, Billie Meiniche, Dimitris Chimonas, Giuliana Beya Dridi, Magdalena Beliavska, Masha Domracheva, Noah Gokul, Sanna Hirvonen, Seta Astreou-Karides, Sharon Romie, Shoshana Walfish, Tara White
Student led reflection:
Chronicles
Program:
Day to Day
Cemeterial Ecologies, Grieving and Zombie Time
Introduction:
This study group explores cemeteries as sites where ecology, writing, belief, ritual, spatial planning and politics intersect. The word cemetery comes from koimētḗrion the Ancient Greek word for sleeping place and associated with bounded, ordered burial grounded. The broader practice of dedicated spaces for the dead is far from exclusive to the West. Burial grounds, ancestral lands, maqbara in Islamic contexts, Jewish beit olam, African sacred groves, and Asian geomantic burial traditions all reveal diverse spatial relationships between the liveness and deadness.
Cemeteries will be approached as ecological sites, where rare plants, birds, insects, soil systems, and beliefs coexist with buried bodies and architecture. They will also be engaged as cultural texts throughout our roaming: headstones, plaques, and materials become inscriptions of belief, belonging, exclusion, and power. Through cinema, mythology, fiction and theory we will trace how cemeteries haunt the imagination as sites of the uncanny, the sacred and intersecting zones of living and dead.
In the face of planterary ecocide and genocide in Palestine, burial grounds must also be understood as political terrains. Recent reports from Gaza document displaced people pitching tents in cemetaries, while the bulldozing, building over or denial of access to cemeteries is a longstanding means of cultural erasure and psychological warfare.
What does it mean to give attention to cemeteries that may not be resting places for our own dead, but remain charged with grief and memory? Can grief itself become a form of resistance, countering necropolitics and embodying alternative temporalities of survival and steadfastness (sumud)? Here we will consider grief not as private sentiment but as collective force: grief, eco-grief, and cultural bereavement as interconnected registers of mourning.
Immersing ourselves in the co-authored texts of Sámi artist and activist Jenni Laiti we will also engage in eco-grief in the context of multispecies solidarity, lands, and ways of living lost to extractive violence, while cultural bereavement names the psychic impact of the erasure and denial of practices, languages, and heritages under military, corporate and industrial as well as governmental refugee and asylum policies and practices.
Through the figures of the ghost, the vampire, and the zombie, we will consider how mythology and cinema gives form to anxieties about undying, survival, and technology. Dr Martin O’Brien’s notion of Zombie Time— an auto-theorisation of how he has outlived his life expectancy as a person with cystic fibrosis, under the anticipation of premature death yet prolonged through medicine—offers a lens for thinking about temporality and mortality differently; drawing on disability and illness studies.
We will also give attention to the undying through the discipline of biochemistry and interspecies vampirism, such as the tapping and extraction of Horseshoe Crab’s blue blood in vaccine development, and the politics of immortal cell lines like HeLa and the case of Henrietta Lacks. We will reflect on how emergent biochemistry and technology reconfigure what it means to live, die, and persist beyond death.
Sharing rituals and cultural practices between ourselves as a study group will be a key part of our process. . . From the Nine Nights of Caribbean mourning to Tunisian and Berber traditions, we will trace how different cultures find porosity between deadness and liveness. We will also explore examples of online funerals and digital memoralization in gaming culture. In turn considering the sites of deathscapes in virtual spaces.
Through somatic exercises, listening to mourning songs, sharing personal and cultural rituals of death, and engaging in field visits to cemeteries (both active and historic), as a group we intend to develop embodied and critical tools to read cemeteries and attending deathscapes as complex assemblages—of soil, ritual, architecture, memory, grief, and resistance. Ultimately, the study-group invites participants to reimagine burial grounds not only as resting places of the dead but as sites where life, grief, ecology, resistance, and continuity converge—where the undying, the ecological, and the political are bound together.
