African Custom Art
For those of you who still think of African art in terms of beads, badly carved masks and models of crocodiles, here's a sculpture dating from 2005 by Isaac Adjetey Sowah, who lives and works in Accra, Ghana. What on earth is it? It's a giant uterus designed for a gynaecologist. It's also a coffin. Folks in Ghana like to be buried in a coffin that shows their trade or profession. Isaac makes custom coffins to fit the bill: shoes, cars, hammers, whatever. Click the title link to see ten of them.
posted by Unknown @ 21.7.07
14 comments
14 Comments:
So what's your choice Coxsoft? A Book or a Cigar?
Neither. (I'd hate to think what a fat cigar might be mistaken for as it slid into the ground.)
Burial should be considered as anti-social as drink driving. We're running out of space for cemetaries in London and they're threatening to invade our Green Belt. Cremation for me. And I hope my ashes get up somebody's nose: Red Ken or somebody like that.
Why not have a tree planted on top? That way we'd leave some beautiful woodlands behind.
That's how I'd like to go.
Besides, with luck we'll soon have run out of fosfuels for burning anyhow.
Lovely idea, Dorothea. Unfortunaly, there doesn't seem to be much choice in the matter. The City of London Crematorium (my nearest) offers to plant a rose and spread the ashes on it, but they charge a fortune for the service and you'll be lucky if the rose lasts more than 10 years, then they want to charge you to plant another one!
Have you seen these people, based in N4;
http://www.naturaldeath.org.uk/
They've apparently got a couple of hundred different 'natural burial grounds'.
Must get this into my will - thanks for reminding me.
Sounds a bundle of laughs, but it's Green and recommended by the British Medical Journal (15 Jan 2000), so can't be bad.
I always though excarnation was a good idea; put the bodies on a platform to be eaten by the birds, afterwards take the bones and put 'em all together in one place - saves on space and has a low carbon footprint.
In Tibet some people used to do "Water Burial". This involved cutting the body into small pieces and feeding them to fish.
Of course, there's also good old fashioned anthropophagy - that's eco-friendly too.
The Inuit leave Granny in the snow for polar bears to finish off. That's eco-friendly too, but not very practical in London.
There may not be that many polar bears, but there are plenty of cats - would you trust your granny to hungry cats? I wouldn't trust mine mate! Have you seen the film "The Emerald Forest" it makes cannibalism seem quite tasteful. It could help to solve the rising cost of food. Did you know that during the 1939-45 war that a number of British scientists suggested that red blood cells (from blood donation - they only wanted the plasma) be used to make black pudding? This was apparently vetoed by Churchill (spoilsport)!
I never did fancy black pudding. Yuk! All those people who object to GM crops should know that's where we're heading if farmers can't produce enough food to keep pace with the population.
Great movie, the Emerald Forest.
"....if farmers can't produce enough food to keep pace with the population."
They never will. The more humans extort from the earth, the more humans will reproduce. This is the disastrous trajectory followed over the last few hundred years. Forget 'demographic shift', it'll never happen for the majority of the world's population that live in degradation.
The scientific study of ecology shows that populations are cyclical, with population flushes inevitably followed by crashes.
What goes up must come down.
Not forgetting also the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Humans are driving most everything else to extinction, so no great surprise if we've nothing left to eat but other humans, eh?
Gosh, what a strong debating issue that giant uterus turned out to be!
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are the usual means of dealing with overpopulation. If we can't rely on those sterling chaps to see us through, what help is there?
H.G. Wells said it all in The Time Machine, with those childlike beautiful young people living an idyllic life on the surface of Earth, and the misshapen subhumans rising out of caverns to harvest them.
Science fiction at its best is a great means of exploring alternative futures.
But I must admit my immediate concern is how the UK is going to deal with that demographic timebomb: the sudden baby boom following the end of World War II. Only three years to go before a large chunk of the population hits 65! Will retirement still be an option by then? Or will we be expected to work till we drop, like slaves?
"Will retirement still be an option by then? Or will we be expected to work till we drop, like slaves?"
imo?
No.
Yes.
Either that or the young will have revolted. With pitchforks.
Glad I never wasted time/money on any form of pension rip-off.
Mmmm. These uteruses are great aren't they?
A coffin uterus is the only way to go!
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