When men die they enter into history. When statues die they enter into art. This botany of death is what we call culture.
An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears. And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where we send black things: to the museum.”
Quote from Statues Also Die by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais (1953)

Museum curation practices of the past and present are flawed and unjust. Our response to this injustice, believing that these objects have been dead since the moment of their extraction from their original context, is to at once present their histories and host their funerals, as only in death are they released from this cycle of curation. Please repeat after me: The statues are also dead. Light the funeral fire.

Funeral Fire’s two major critiques involve the museum's inadequacy in keeping records on the artifacts within their collection and how the museum’s methods of display, the traditional vitrine, causes the artifact to appear to be a piece within a collection, one of many, muting the objects’ unique identity composed by its culture and history. In our installation, we celebrate the stories of the lives that these artifacts may have lived while mourning the loss of the stories we could not recover.

AXONOMETRIC VIEWS

FABRICATION

DRAWINGS