The Life of the Dead. Objects and Dramaturgies of Presence

This dramaturgical research project explores the dialogue between life and death in literature and theatre through objects connected to funerary practices, mourning rituals, and the remembrance of the dead. Its central question is: How can writing turn the material presence of these objects into voice, narrative, and memory, and tell how the dead remain intertwined with the life of a community?

The project begins from the premise that objects are more than traces of a completed past or symbolic representations of absence. In certain cultural contexts, they actively mediate between different forms of existence: they preserve traces, carry memories, sustain bonds, and shape the relationship between the living, the dead, and the land. Their material presence does not simply evoke those who are gone. It also helps keep them present and allows them to continue acting in the world.

From a decolonial perspective, the project questions the divisions that have shaped Western modernity: life and death, subject and object, matter and spirit, nature and culture. These divisions have served as colonial ways of organising knowledge and ranking different understandings of the world. In “La vida y la muerte se hermanan” a poem by the Mapuche writer Graciela Huinao, life and death do not appear as opposing realities, but as dimensions that speak to one another, become intertwined, and transform each other. Her writing allows us to examine how literature preserves knowledge and relationships with the dead, while also revealing the fractures caused by the colonial imposition of a language, a territory, and an ontology.

The theoretical framework draws particularly on Achille Mbembe’s concept of the “earthly community.” Moving beyond an anthropocentric understanding of existence, Mbembe describes the Earth as a web of relations among human beings, animals, plants, minerals, invisible forces, ancestors, technologies, and objects. None of these entities exists in complete isolation; all are shaped through exchange and transformation. Within this relational understanding of the world, objects are not inert things. They can produce effects, carry forces, and create bridges between different forms of existence. Masks, urns, offerings, and other ritual objects can therefore be understood as “tools of life”: material forms that commemorate the dead, sustain collective memory, and connect life with death.

The project’s research-creation methodology brings theoretical and literary analysis into dialogue with practice-based research. Its process is shaped by the concept of “situated theatre,” developed in my dissertation Hacia un teatro situado: la dramaturgia inédita de Raúl Ruiz (Chaim, 2026). From this perspective, space and objects are not a passive setting for a finished work, but elements that take part in its writing. The project is built around an open theatrical text that changes in each location through an engagement with the objects found there, their material qualities, their ritual uses, and the memories they hold. Each new version becomes a situated form of theatrical inquiry into the ways objects mediate between the living and the dead.

This line of research-creation has developed through several stages: Auf der anderen Seite (High Life Festival, Binningen, 2020), Teatro para Una (Synaps Festival, Basel, 2023), Ich atme, du atmest – Día de Muertos (University of Basel, 2023), and Einatmen/Ausatmen (Wabe, Basel, 2023). These works form the practical foundation of the current project, which looks more closely at how funerary and commemorative objects make other ways of relating to death perceptible. The current stage focuses on writing as a meeting place for objects, the living, and the dead. Its aim is to show that the dead do not disappear entirely from our shared reality. They remain in objects, in the earth, in words, and in the relationships through which a community tells stories, remembers, cares, and reshapes its world.