Neither wholly water nor land, the intractable wetland manifests the thinnest boundary between material, immaterial, and spiritual realms. The rituals of returning to sites of burial and offering reinforce the tie between material and immaterial. Maintaining and celebrating these rituals strengthens the connection to the presence and expansive interdependence of these dimensions. To die is not to cease, but to continue transformed. Life and death fold into each other, unbound from separate worlds or fixed materiality. That which cannot maintain our material life can sustain another. To offer the flesh of the body back to the cycle of life is an act of generosity.

At Hart Island, the expanding salt marsh provides the most ecologically active and spiritually latent site to encounter death. Here, we are proposing a new alternative to conventional burial by offering the body to the wetland. Specifically, we are constructing a series of tidal pools to house the grass shrimp. A native scavenger, the shrimp will be nurtured by the bodies of loved ones placed into the marsh. Hosting the excarnation of the body, the flesh will be offered as a direct transition from death to life. In this ritualized process, the body is not treated as a clinical object. Its transformation is compassionate and energetic. One becomes the ocean. A dignified death sustains life.

In the first half of the semester, we undertook a series of material studies to explore the nature of impermanence. Employing sugar and rice paper we explored the structural and transformational properties of these delicate and soluble materials. The intricate and organic pools and pleats temporarily freeze time and establish a structural logic before ultimately dissolving. After midterm, we continued these investigations using thread and organza, exploring how the material responds to the applied organizational structure.

Over the next 75 years and beyond, Hart Island may too surrender to the Long Island Sound with sea levels projected to rise by 6ft. It begins slowly and escalates quickly. We are fostering the native grass shrimp as the primary agent for our proposed excarnation. Under ideal conditions, a large number of small shrimp can reduce a body to bones in a little as a couple of days and up to a few weeks. In addition to the shrimp, we are employing other key species such as eelgrass, cattails, and mud snails to further support the salt marsh ecosystem. The salt marsh is a unique ecosystem that welcomes the rising sea level while mitigating rapid erosion.

The five pools are populated according to the intertidal zone. The shrimp, snails, and grasses digest and transform the body into rich nutrients which are further sequestered and utilized in the successive pools. These remaining pools are organized by other key species which regulate key nutrients, such as water lilies and irises which host flocking bacteria to capture nutrients in its roots, before flowing into the sound.

For our architecture, the translucent outer enclosure allows for an inner pool to maintain a habitable conditions for the shrimp and wetlands during the freezing winters. The architecture thus facilitates the process of excarnation and wetland water transformation by hosting it all year long.