Bel Deering 2026

Somerset Rivers Authority, United Kingdom

Dying Twice: Landscapes of remembrance in a flooded future

As climate change intensifies, burial grounds are increasingly vulnerable to inundation and erosion through flood events. This paper takes a speculative journey through the possible futures of a cemetery at flood risk, asking how memory might persist and remembrance be sustained when the material is submerged. Drawing on emerging climate change policy and practice, the paper engages with the notion of the deceased ‘dying twice’: first through biological death, and again through the loss of memorial spaces, grave markers, and other material artefacts of remembrance. It explores how burial grounds might transition from physically bounded landscapes into more dispersed and reconfigured sites of memory when their objective form is at risk. Alongside technological approaches such as virtual reality and digital twinning, the paper foregrounds the vernacular through community led memorial practices, from storytelling to decoupage. Looking through the lens of memory-work, these approaches are framed as ways to re assemble relationships between people, place, and the dead through creative acts. Selecting, positioning, layering, or collecting curating and performing; remembrance is positioned as an embodied process rather than a monumental outcome.  The paper argues that such imaginative practices can mitigate this second ‘death’, enabling burial grounds to continue as landscapes of remembrance even when they are physically transformed or lost.

Events

The Cemetery Research Group runs two events a year: in May and in November. Follow the links and send in an abstract