When We Die, Where Do We Go?

As part of the Anti-University Now 2022 Festival, Sharples co-led an Artist Walk & Talk at Abney Park Cemetery, London, collaboratively facilitated with care worker, horticultural therapy volunteer, and trainee Death Doula Dr. Katie Crabtree, supported by Hackney Council. This interdisciplinary event explored entangled practices of living and dying through embodied experience and reflective dialogue. Set in Abney Park Cemetery – a site of historic and ecological significance – the walk invited participants to engage in open conversations about mortality, death care, and observed ecologies. These conversations unfolded alongside observations of graves, deadwood, and fertile ecosystems, framing the cemetery as a dynamic site of decomposition and renewal. Death was approached not as absence, but as an active, transitional process central to ecological vitality. The project was informed by New Materialist reading (Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning; Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self; and With the End in Mind: Dying, Death and Wisdom in an Age of Denial), and aimed to support public understanding of our interconnectedness with non-human life. The workshop foregrounded the cemetery as a living ecosystem, reframing death as an energetic and necessary part of more-than-human ecological systems, allowing for both human and non-human reflections. By creating space for communal contemplation and dialogue, the project aimed to make death more approachable as a subject matter, and highlighted the potential of arts-led work to support compassionate engagement with mortality. The workshop contributed to Sharples’ ongoing research into necro-ecologies and architectures.