MAKING SPACE FOR THE OTHER. Cemeteries as performing Places for inclusive, safe, resilient Societies: an interdisciplinary Project.

The project investigates the performativity of space considering it a condition in building inclusive multicultural societies, because space is a very relevant medium in the pursuit of social equity and sustainability. Instead of dealing with museums, libraries or piazzas, the focus is on specific places not yet taken into account in their relevance for the question, i.e. cemeteries. The sacred and death are archetypal themes of space; around them the very meaning of the process of human civilisation revolves and the original meaning of architecture with it. Contemporary societies remove the theme of death, due to their “overriding interest in self-preservation and domination” (Scherer). Even though the images of wars and pandemic seem to urge society to take it seriously, the “homo technologicus” model remove severy thing it cannot control (and death is one of them). The project considers that new reflections on finitude and placeness of human beings can open new ways for living together. Cemeteries concern all human beings but differently, they are very paradoxical places –between life and death, private and public, differences and commonalities, natural and cultural, past and future – so they offer a complex point of view, which is very generative for thinking and innovative for social practices. Therefore the project emphasises cemeteries as diaphragms that help to discover conditions of possibility for performing more inclusive, fair, sustainable societies. The project takes an interdisciplinary point of view, but by working in a philosophical horizon.