ouroboros by A Carelli from italy

The theme of environmental sustainability of human activities has historically been introduced to the public through the practice of small communities of in- dividuals able to generate cultural practice alternatives. This same trend can be seen in the search for sustainability in funerary practices.

For instance, the adoption of new technologies yielding to sustainable final treatment of the body, such as the transformation of the body into compost, is directly related to the society’s ability to generate meaning and acceptance in re- spect of burial practices that deviate significantly from the tradition

How to design to ease the understanding and collective construction of new sustainable practices?
The idea of the incessant action of transformations and redefinitions of cultural practices can be exemplified using the imaginary Ouroboros, a mythical animal that eats its own tail suggesting the idea of something constantly re-creating it- self.

With this suggestion in mind, we reflected on the need to design a flexible tool for mapping, disseminate and restore through a dynamic and easy to use repre- sentation, the transformations taking place in funeral rituals, practice of comme- moration, with the aim to accelerate and facilitate the process of collective construction of meaning around funerary sustainable practices.

Therefore, the project involves a platform filtering and organising the informa- tion conveyed via the Twitter hashtag #ouroboros. The hashtag thus becomes the reference for mapping, transmitting and sharing the process of collective con- struction of new cultural practices. Photos, videos, personal thoughts and other content in digital form are aggregated through Ouroboros in a dynamic tag cloud: a manifestation of how the search for funerary practices can generate shared su- stainable cultural practices.

Ouroboros also acts as a digital memory space: it facilitates the aggregation of messages of condolence spread online through social networks, which is a more and more widely accepted practice among social media, despite being largely un- derestimated by the operators of social media.