Lydia Smith: Burial Sites Book Launch

Join Ulises and artist Lydia Smith for the launch of the multivolume artist book Burial Sites. Smith will share a reading paired with images selected from the project. A unique large-scale version of the book created for public exhibition will be displayed during the event for attendees to experience. Burial Sites was recently acquired by the Free Library of Philadelphia Maps Collection and features images of multiple Philadelphia cemeteries.

Burial Sites is an artist book and social practice project considering how burial landscapes reflect cultural rituals around death, mourning processes, and community politics. A project of accumulation, the book grapples with the task of documentation and the archive through images of monuments for the dead. Burial Sites comprises 13,000 images, spans 15 countries across six continents, and features over 250 cemeteries, memorials, crematoriums, and graveyards. In each site, the camera is used as a drawing apparatus mirroring the body’s movement as it walks through the landscape, capturing hundreds of images as research, documents, and

embodied records. The camera’s attention wanders to the in-between spaces of memory and rests its lens on the seemingly mundane elements of each site’s infrastructure. The resulting collection of images features gardening tools, garbage cans, cracks in monuments, foliage, decorative symbols, religious ephemera, and signage. These peripheral images point to various traditions, religions, and histories embedded in sites of burial. The book’s investigations generate questions about the unique entanglements of time, maintenance, social hierarchy, politics, and the community’s role in place-making.

www.burialsitesbook.com

About the Artist:

Lydia Smith (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Columbus, OH. Her practice focuses on the archive as a phenomenological site for understanding the remnants of the past, death, time, and place. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Art at Ohio State and will spend the summer of 2025 in Dresden, Germany, as a recipient of the Greater Columbus Arts Council exchange residency.

Host or Publisher Ray Philly