After I Die, I'll Be a Fungi
JULY 28, 2011 TAGS:
Mushrooms! That's how artist Jae Rhim Lee plans on going from birth to earth. Fed up with the funeral-industrial-complex's version of a dignified burial--replete with chemicals, make-up and faux mahogany-- Lee designed a body suit that contains lines of mushroom spores that will feed off of her corpse as it decomposes.
At a TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland two weeks ago, she introduced her Infinity Burial Project, a fungus-based intervention and manifesto on reconceiving of our lives, our bodies and our deaths. Not only will Lee's mushroom break down the toxins in her body. but they will provide nourishment to root structures around wherever she ends up being buried.
It's not as easy as strapping on some spores however. Lee has been training toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms that normally grow on decaying wood and forest biomass to grow on her body's organic material. These "Infinity mushrooms" will "recognise and eat my body after I die," as she told NewScientist magazine. Why mushrooms? Lee explains that fungi are an "interface organism between life and death," decomposing dead matter in the service of living matter.
The larger project, Lee adds, is about cultural transformation: "It's the idea that somehow death acceptance is needed for environmental stewardship."
Death acceptance is so hot right now.
New York Times columnist David Brooks expressed a widely whispered sentiment about the subtext of the U.S Debt crisis and budget overhaul. Entitlement benefits for the super old often include costly end-of-life treatment meant to stave off death at such an advanced age that there is little personal benefit and great societal cost.
On the note of overtreatment, Katy Butler, writing at Alternet, penned a lengthy essay about her father's drawn out death and mishandled medical care. Her father, a retired history professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, had to undergo a seemingly absurd Rube-Goldberg machine of medical procedures. No gain in quality of health and huge loss in quality of life.
So, what have we learned: Strap on a mushroom suit and sign up to be a member of the Decompiculture Society. Decompinauts Unite!
DECOMPICULTURE SOCIETY MISSION
The Decompiculture Society promotes intimacy with and acceptance of the physical realities of decomposition as vehicles toward death acceptance. The Society seeks to advance knowledge and awareness of postmortem options through research, education, and decompiculture: the cultivation of organisms that assist in metabolic decay. Society members include funeral industry professionals, providers of green burial options, artists, designers, health-care workers, and curious individuals who seek to explore the relationship between human bodies and the environment from a secular perspective.
(First Image: James Duncan Davidson/TED, Second Image: http://infinityburialproject.com/)
At a TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland two weeks ago, she introduced her Infinity Burial Project, a fungus-based intervention and manifesto on reconceiving of our lives, our bodies and our deaths. Not only will Lee's mushroom break down the toxins in her body. but they will provide nourishment to root structures around wherever she ends up being buried.It's not as easy as strapping on some spores however. Lee has been training toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms that normally grow on decaying wood and forest biomass to grow on her body's organic material. These "Infinity mushrooms" will "recognise and eat my body after I die," as she told NewScientist magazine. Why mushrooms? Lee explains that fungi are an "interface organism between life and death," decomposing dead matter in the service of living matter.
The larger project, Lee adds, is about cultural transformation: "It's the idea that somehow death acceptance is needed for environmental stewardship."
Death acceptance is so hot right now.
New York Times columnist David Brooks expressed a widely whispered sentiment about the subtext of the U.S Debt crisis and budget overhaul. Entitlement benefits for the super old often include costly end-of-life treatment meant to stave off death at such an advanced age that there is little personal benefit and great societal cost.
On the note of overtreatment, Katy Butler, writing at Alternet, penned a lengthy essay about her father's drawn out death and mishandled medical care. Her father, a retired history professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, had to undergo a seemingly absurd Rube-Goldberg machine of medical procedures. No gain in quality of health and huge loss in quality of life.
So, what have we learned: Strap on a mushroom suit and sign up to be a member of the Decompiculture Society. Decompinauts Unite!
DECOMPICULTURE SOCIETY MISSION
The Decompiculture Society promotes intimacy with and acceptance of the physical realities of decomposition as vehicles toward death acceptance. The Society seeks to advance knowledge and awareness of postmortem options through research, education, and decompiculture: the cultivation of organisms that assist in metabolic decay. Society members include funeral industry professionals, providers of green burial options, artists, designers, health-care workers, and curious individuals who seek to explore the relationship between human bodies and the environment from a secular perspective.
(First Image: James Duncan Davidson/TED, Second Image: http://infinityburialproject.com/)
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