Pascaline Thiollière
Grenoble School of Architecture, AAU Lab, UGA, Grenoble, France
pascaline.thiolliere@grenoble.archi.fr
Towards a new materiality of human remains
Compared with Northern Europe or countries such as India, where cremation is rooted in local culture and religion, the practice of cremation in France started rather late, but it now accounts for more than half of funerals in most large French cities (national average rising from 1% in 1980 to 46% in 2024). This practice initially led to the creation of columbaria, which are structures designed for storing urns in superimposed niches. These structures date back to Roman antiquity and were revived with the construction of the first crematoria at the end of the 19th century. Columbaria are located in cemeteries or crematoria cinerary gardens, and in recent decades they have been supplemented by other facilities, such as scattering lawns and wells. However, these offerings from public funeral services do not seem to fulfil all desires, as evidenced by the recent surge in scatterings outside cemeteries in open countryside. This unconventional practice has been made possible by the standardisation of pulverising cremated bone fragments and the introduction of shredders in crematoria since the late 1970s. This process makes the ashes less voluminous, more discreet and easier to spread.
In Western countries, the scattering of remains has historically referred to those considered ‘bad dead’ (witches, criminals and stillborn babies), who were not given a final resting place and therefore had no right to be remembered. In its emerging form in France, this practice seems to address various contemporary concerns: a rejection of cemeteries as overly constrained, costly and uncomfortable spaces; a desire to reduce the carbon footprint of burials and reappropriate funerals; an embrace of an ecological narrative that places humans alongside other living beings and the deceased within the cycle of life.
Investigating burial place dissemination
To gain a better understanding of this largely unexplored practice in France, we have set up a research-creation programme called ‘Gestes et territoires de la mort en cendres’ (Gestures and territories of death in ashes). This programme brings together artists, funeral professionals and multidisciplinary researchers specialising in architecture, atmospheres, anthropology and somatics. Initially, we collected testimonies of scatterings (some fifty to date via an online form) in order to understand the choice of location, sequence of events, and material configuration of the scatterings. We then re-enacted these micro-stories in workshop sessions to explore them from different perspectives and gain insight into what remains implicit.
This practice does not follow any dogma or tradition and remains experimental for the time being. Legislation remains very vague. A few legal provisions, mainly introduced in 2008, attempt to provide a framework by prohibiting the scattering of ashes on private property to prevent the appropriation of the deceased and the division of ashes, thus aligning them with the status of corpses. Nevertheless, despite the permissive nature of the legislation, 45% of French people believe that this practice is illegal.
The first material challenges the assumption that mourning and remembering dispersed dead requires a specific place. Although these experiences are often accompanied by awkwardness and discomfort, which are often linked to the feeling of clandestinity and unpreparedness, sites for scattering ashes in nature can also give rise to real acts of separation, accomplished with relief and serenity. These sites can accommodate successive times of remembrance, which often take the form of collective remembrance walks involving picnics, planting or building cairns. A wide variety of scattering gestures were observed, adapted to the location and the element with which the ashes were intermingled. Examples include bathing with ashes in the sea, rivers or lakes; throwing ashes into the air from a promontory or mountain peak; pouring ashes into a hollow formed in the earth. These discreet rituals are performed with great simplicity and joy, in contrast to the solemnity of traditional funeral rites. They invoke the symbolism of a journey through the elements, in which the deceased preside over their river, mountain or beach and become part of a planetary community. Whether this emerging form of funerary ritual also signifies the emergence of ecospiritualities will be revealed by ongoing ethnographic research.
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