Home is where the haunt is: Mortuary practices in the Fontanelle (Naples) and Hart Island (New York).
Ulrich van Loyen - University of Siegen
Pandemics generate large numbers of anonymized dead within a short period of time, posing not only a hygienic and administrative problem, but an ethical and religious one. Using two cemeteries that have a long history as pandemic cemeteries in their cities, this presentation attempts to explore how anonymity can be used as a cultural resource and what implications this has for the idea of urban care. The Fontanelle in Naples are associated with the plague dead, who must be ritually pacified in order to act as advocates for the responsible urban community; Hart Island, on the other hand, represents the unknown AIDS dead of New York, and thus the question of the twisting of social and sexual discrimination in a city that must increasingly learn to merge its self-awareness and its vulnerability. Furthermore, both cemeteries, as places of remembrance, force imaginative practices of the absent, which will be compared against the background of their medial order (dream and internet: old and new media).