Jae Rhim Lee is "a visual artist, designer, and researcher whose work proposes unorthodox relationships between the mind/body/self and the built and natural environment." (http://zonezerozerostudio.com/bio ). She struggled with the idea that as westerners we deny the aesthetics of death and in particular we use polluting substances (i.e. formaldehyde) to preserve bodies so that they are looking like sleeping. She calls this a "denial" of death.
So she decided to create a suit from mushrooms that not only would decompose without harming the environment, but through the properties of the said mushroom actually cleanse it. This mushroom, called "Infinity Mushroom" will be "a unique strain(s) of fungi that will be trained to decompose bodies and remediate the industrial toxins in bodies." (http://infinityburialproject.com/mushroom ).
The suit in itself also presents challenges: "fitted organic cotton [...] with a crocheted netting on top in a pattern resembling the growth of mushroom mycelium"; the netting is where the spores would be but Jae Rhim Lee is thinking that this might actually not work "because mushroom spores are hard to grow outside of petri dishes", and has an alternative ready: "the next thing I'm thinking of is using gelatin as, basically, a second skin." (read the full interview: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/07/designing-a-mushroom-death-suit.html ).
Seen in the context of the "natural burial movement" (see for example http://naturalburial.coop/), it is interesting to see how the way we dispose of the dead nowadays (or the way some of us wish to dispose of them) is so much influenced by environmental concerns. Low impact on the environment is integrating, and possibly substituting in certain cases, other systems of value around how we bury our dead, such as for example religious concerns relating to blessings, orientation of the body and afterlife; medical concerns about hygiene and pragmatism; or emotional concerns about the body maintaining the essence of the person in its “corpse version”.
I have the strange feeling (un-tested and un-researched, just so you know) that the more our worries about the afterlife decreases (e.g. we develop an attitude such as “if it’s there it’s there”), the more we focus on the here-and-now and therefore worry about the impact of our death on this life. This goes in many directions, such as planning funerals carefully before we die, purchasing graves and coffins, leave videos and messages for our beloved to encourage them in continue with their lives, etc. The natural burial and infinity burial are one aspect of this that has to do with the corpse, this controversial and fascinating entity that we are left with when we die. Can you imagine if we disappeared when we died? Death would be so much less interesting.
