The Funeral of the Land

One-line

Using plastic water bottles generated through daily life, I return waste to the land at the city’s edge.
Through digging, placement, and burial, the work stages a funeral-like environmental action—making the weight of everyday consumption spatially visible.

Info

• Time / Location: Summer 2021 · Beijing
• Type: Action · site intervention · staged environment · photographic documentation (solo project)
• Medium: Plastic water bottles (collected from my daily life) · digging & burial · on-site placement · photography
• Role: Concept + action design · material collection & handling · on-site construction · photo documentation & editing
• Status: Completed action and image series (Series)
• Keywords: Environmental Action · Site Intervention · Ritual Structure · Waste Material · Field Documentation · Photography

Goal & Challenge

This work begins at a personal scale. Instead of leaning on grand environmental narratives, it treats one person’s plastic waste as a countable trace of living—a material record of time.

The goal is to place that everyday waste back into a natural environment, so “discarding” stops being an abstract idea and becomes a scene that must be confronted.

The core challenge is to avoid accusation or slogan. Through a single concrete action and a carefully organized site, the work aims to produce a felt tension: consumption touching land—directly, physically, and without moral instruction.

System — Action + Scene

The project follows a simple and explicit chain:

Collect (daily life) → sort / prepare → carry to the outskirts → dig → place / stack → bury → photograph

The site is composed with minimal intervention, forming a funeral-like structure:

Red Plastic Bottles

As “remains” to be placed and processed, they stay visibly abrupt against the earth.

Digging & Burial

A gesture that imitates closure, yet does not truly produce disappearance.

Shovel + Process Traces

Marks of work remain in the ground and around the site, so the scene reads as an ongoing ritual of handling.

Edge Land / Wilderness

The ground becomes a carrier where industrial material meets soil without mediation.

Validation & Current Build

The work is presented through site construction and photographic documentation.
The plastic is buried in soil yet remains clearly visible—exposing the rupture between “processing” and “disappearing.”

During excavation, a grasshopper appeared on the ground, placing a trace of living nature directly beside the funeral-like scene. The image holds a quieter tension: damage and continuation, death and growth, existing at once in the same space.

The project is completed as a photographic series.

Next — Expandable Directions

• Time Dimension
  Repeat visits and staged documentation at the same location to sharpen the temporality of “buried yet still present.”

• Quantified Boundary
  Introduce count / cycle information (e.g., bottles accumulated over a period) without breaking the work’s poetic register, reinforcing the relation between personal scale and land capacity.

• Scene Grammar
  Explore different placement and burial patterns so the “ritual structure” reads with a clearer visual path.

Credits

Solo project · Summer 2021 · Beijing