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Landscape of Memories

Part 1 Project 2019
Ingmars Ingus Upatnieks
Northumbria University Newcastle | UK
With faith in religion fading, few people recognise the North East of England as a place of great significance in the story of Christianity. This project is a protest against forgetting and seeks to preserve memory through architectural and landscape interventions in the religiously significant city park of Jesmond Dene. A Museum of Religion borrows the scale of the landscape and the ruinous St Mary’s Chapel is revitalised as an artefact along a procession where reconstructed ecclesiastical spatiality references and intensifies the found spatiality of a dense woodland. Over the years a new funerary landscape condition of self-deteriorating burial caves spreads across the park. Cemeteries were once spaces for leisure and public funerary culture, but today our relationship with mortality is a distant one. This project constructs a new set of rituals and a new architectural language based around a sustainable idea for the commemoration of death – mushroom burial. Sand-cast concrete structures create moments of raised awareness amongst the wild landscape and reference the picturesque history of the park. Memory and mortality must be returned to the city’s consciousness before society accepts their contingency and the powerful juxtaposition of sacred and profane places is lost forever.
Ingmars Ingus Upatnieks

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2019
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