Anywhere can be the center of the world.

- Black Elk

These psychic, corporeal cemetery maps were made to visualize the idea of “body territory:” that communal burial sites can be thought of as an extension of the human body. These are maps of All Faith’s Cemetery in Queens, NY and are rendered as psychic geography, seeing each place on earth as both completely unique, and equally important - along with its individual configurations of plants, animals, and spirits. This place contains multiple, concurrent timeframes and spatial realities that flow from one to another. To translate this cosmological space into Christian lexicon: these maps could be read in the same way as Hieronymus Bosch’s alter piece, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” as simultaneously representing Heaven, Earth, and Hell.

Earth

The Earth Tapestry panel depicts All Faiths as transitory space. Hybrid creatures, a combination of grassy plants, winged insects, and human skeletons move through the space both above and below ground. The center of the garden holds a large monument to the dead, as well as to the life that flourishes in the immediate holobiome of the garden. The ring of animalistic mountains around the cemetery has a head, two arms, two legs, and a tail, indicating that while the cemetery is a land, it is also a body.

Patte Loper

Patte Loper