50,000 New Yorkers die each year. About 2% of those who die annually are buried in collective graves on Hart Island, New York City’s municipal cemetery. Hart Island and its collective burial practices are essential to the city but have historically been stigmatized. The Department of Correction, which exercised control over Hart Island for over a century, further perpetuated this stigmatization by rendering the island an auxiliary jail to Rikers Island—thus creating an almost inextricable association between collective burial and the U.S. prison system. In doing so, the DOC effectively created an impenetrable barrier between those buried on Hart Island—often labeled as the “unknown” and “unclaimed”—their loved ones, and the rest of New York.
This project is a living archive intended to render visible the practice of collective burial and to honor the “unknown” and “unclaimed” who have died. The project is a series of processional walls constructed from rammed earth blocks made from the displaced soil of ongoing collective burials on Hart Island. These walls are punctuated and lined with climatized spaces that offer respite from the island’s harsh conditions—spaces for contemplation, mourning, celebration, and gathering.
This archive is temporal, always growing, eroding, and sometimes indiscernible. Inevitably, it will become host to symbiotic plant and animal life that will both erode and fortify the walls. This project is an exercise in prioritizing tending and care, over preservation or permanence. It embraces, accepts, and finds beauty in the necessary and the inevitable.
