Temple of Ancestors

Bonding needs a sanctuary.

Temple of Ancestors is a sanctuary for remembering.

It’s the most mysterious place at Foresta. A place where language thins, where the living acknowledge the dead as ecological, cultural, and spiritual co-presence (not as absence or disappearance).

Its intention honours ancestry beyond family lineage: ancestors may be human, plant, animal, microbial, elemental, cultural, wounded, forgotten, misunderstood, unnamed.

Ancestry may be all that has made us possible, all that continues to act through us, and all that asks something of us.

Restoration of bonding within such relational space requires protection from speed, extraction, noise, performance, irony, and consumption.

A sanctuary as a symbolic temple manifests and protects the possibility of seriousness of such intention.

So if there is no being/non-being antagonism, totalising separation or fundamental dichotomy between the living and dead, if the dead are ecological and political co-presence to the living, what may be the conditions of existence and protocols of approach for such a sanctuary? How might Temple of Ancestors manifest itself as a physical (constructed, built, woven, grown, gestured) body of intention? How much or what should it articulate for a visitor?