It's hard for me to quanitfy how much time I've spent thinking about the ways in which humans attempt to contend with grief through funerary sculpture. I am incredibly desensitized to the design of cemeteries at this point. But this particular grave caught my eye today, reminded me of the complicated relationship with physical spaces for grief that led me to monumental architecture in the first place. This is located in De Nieuwe Oosterbegraafplaats" in Amsterdam, Netherlands. (It translates literally to "The New Eastern Cemetery.)
This monument is simple, worked in polished concrete, with visible coarse aggregate on the edges. Waves come up from the Earth to reveal a name. They roughly approximate the outline of the burial plot. The thickness of these shapes, as well as the maximum height, both imply to me that the designer understood a more typical headstone design, and wanted this monument to be visually sympathetic to the surrounding, more typical plots. The rhythm of the forms subverts what is typical, but in such a gentle way. It was meant to engage with the surrounding greenery. Grass, weeds, and bluebells fill in the spaces in between, softening a gesture made in such a rigid material. There is something to be said about the material choice itself - to make poured concrete recognizable as the movement of something as flexible as water.
There is an epitaph, Un ocean d'amour, in French, "An Ocean of Love."
It all made me wonder about who this person was, and who they left behind. Did they contain an ocean of love? Is it the mourners who now express a collective ocean of love. Or is it, perhaps, a more personal, private reference?
There is something so unbelieveably quiet about it all. I cried about it a little as soon as I made it back to my hotel.
