Three Burials (Goethe-Institut Portugal) (2026-2028)

On October 06th at 6PM I buried three objects in the garden of the Goethe-Institut in Lisbon.

They come out in the autumn of 2028. Between those two dates there is nothing to see, and the nothing is most of the work.

The journey the objects are on is a long one. They will travel around the sun twice, they will travel over 20 billion kilometres across the universe. And yet when I will go back to get them out in two years, they will be in the same place. Because we all travel with them, and so does the place.

The three objects are assigned to the past, the present and the future. They also make three points on a map.

Three points describe exactly one circle. When the three sit almost in a line the circle becomes enormous, and this one leaves the garden, passes over the wall, and carries on somewhere out above the city. Nobody will ever see it. It is still entirely specific. Its centre is a real place and nothing marks it.

There is a dragon tree in that garden. Dragon trees make no rings, so nobody can tell you how old it is. It was already there when the building was a palace, and when it was a law faculty, and when it was an embassy, and it is there now. It knows nothing about any of that and it outlasted all of it.

The objects are only partly glazed. The unglazed parts are the agreement. That is where the soil can get in and do its own writing, for two years, while nobody is watching. In 2028 I will find out what it wrote.

I also wrapped them in canvas. Nature loves to devour canvas and so I hope it will love the objects and eat them up a little bit at least.

Below are the three short texts I read to the audience, while my sons were humming an imaginary song very slowly.



What was
Where do you come from, idea, word, thing?
Where do you come from?
What made you?
Were you rock, or liquid, or waves rising from something before there was a place or time?

Who were those here before us?
They walked on this very earth,
this very soil. The soil which required death to exist.

They were born and they lived and they died.
They gave back to us the water they drank,
and their breath, the first one and the last,
is all around us again.

And so we take you, made of what we inherited from them,
and we return you to the earth from which we all emerged.
We return you.
You return.

What is
Where are we now?
Who are we now?
Who are we, really?
What are we truly made of?
The water we drink is the water which keeps
flowing through everything around us.
Every breath we take is connected to all the other
breath taken around us right now,
We stand on this ground today.
And we give back to the Earth a piece of it that
is shaped just enough to invite collaboration
with it. We touch the Earth and we shape it.

Only now can we touch this world;
each other and all around us.

Piece of the Earth you were shaped and are here to stay.
Soil, water, time and the smallest living things
will continue what our hands began.
Now.

What will be

What will become of us?
Where are we all traveling on this Earth?

When we will lift you out of this ground, two years from now,
we will have circled the sun twice, having traveled almost two billion Kilometers.
The sun will have carried us along its orbit,
and the galaxy will have carried the sun.
Measured against the oldest light we can see,
we will have traveled twenty-three billion Kilometers.
and yet we will find you in the same place,
because this very place travels with us.

This much of the future we can measure.
The rest we can only ask, imagine, write down.

The future requires death.
We all need to make room for those who will look at what we have left them?
Will they wonder whether we could think as they do?
For them we will be in the very past we just thought about.

We think we create the future, and yet the future also makes us.
Those still to come are already shaping our hands.

Who are they?
Where will they emerge from?
In what part of the Earth is the idea of them already growing?

All on a journey.

All in balance
All in motion
All interconnected