Floating cemetery

In 2004 Ralco Reservoir was unexpectedly flooded, inundating the Pehuenche cemetery settled in the valley. Based on their beliefs, is designed a meeting point between the living and the dead, in order to create a space for the memory of a sacred place, to raise a truth again over the water , bringing the community again closer to its dead, eternally.

Pehuenche cosmovision considers our world as part of a sequence of overlapping square platforms connected vertically by an axis, which allows us to understand that the communication between the different planes/worlds is by a vertical relation. Based on these beliefs, the project is designed over the water and over the flooded cemetery as a meeting point between the living and the dead. It was conceived as a single concrete element that establishes a vertical communication between them, generating a door or threshold to the world of the dead through a simple and pure volume, lacking of any symbolism but loaded in content in its spatiality, perpetuating the task of remembering and gathering the community indefinitely. This is how we can attempt to make visible something that wanted to be hidden, to raise a truth again over the water, projecting a work whose complexity is not found in his formal or material characteristics, but rather in its sensibility to approach to a problem that seems impossible to solve. All this inside a culture that has a very particular way of understanding the cosmos and the communication between his different planes, task that only will be possible to materialize when we realize that the connection is mainly on a spiritual plane. Taking as reference the cosmic platform in which we inhabit (Mapu), a subtraction of its center is made, marking the point of connection between the cosmic axis and the earthly plane, creating the door between the living and the deads, which will also indicate the exact location of the flooded cemetery. Between the central space and the perimeter of the volume, an empty space allows for the element's buoyancy. In this area also will take place an space for an intimate memory moment, where around seven hundred empty niches will remember the space left by the dead buried under water and earth, wich ones will enable those people who could not rest next to their ancestors, as tradition dictates, to be repatriated to this place, replacing inside the memorial their traditional funeral totem (Chemamull), filling little by little the spaces left by their ancestors on earth.