Our first visit to Pere Lachaise wasn’t enough for me to find ideas for the tour project. I had to come back there the following weekend and make a better observation of my surroundings. I was able to expand the very first observations I made during our first visit by brainstorming and sketching.
In my brainstorm, I took note of the specific observations I made; I focused on the different categories of graves, the different religions seen in the cemetery, the different categories of buried people (age, fame, nationalities,…), the different activities taking place in the cemetery, and the different elements constituting the upper world (nature, birds, people). After that, I defined what a tour is.
After the brainstorm, I sketched my written observations in a way of perhaps expanding it.
On the whole, what stroke me most was the coexistence of life with death. While dead people are buried under the grass and soil of Pere Lachaise Cemetery, nature, people, animals, constantly renew itself in the living world. There’s also a diversity residing in both living and death world but specifically in the world of the dead; famous people, people of all ages, of all religions, of different eras, who died all differently, are buried in either simple, or magnificent, or huge , or small, or modern, or anonymous tombs. They all are commemorated in different ways. I was able to deduce how rich in terms of history Pere Lachaise is.
