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Online Sacralization Danish memorial site Mindet.dk as a marked place for

performing grief and inventing memories

Places, People, Stories: the Mediated Places-session, Linnéuniversitetet, Kalmar September 30th 2011

Kjetil Sandvik,

Associate professor, University of Copenhagen

+ Mindet.dk: an introduction

Mindet.dk is the only Danish online community for individual performances

of grief and mourning over the loss of loved ones (“in memory of those we

got, lost and loved”) and facilitates well-known and easy-applied media and

interactive materiality

Ca. 850 memories (individual memory profiles for dead loved ones)

Light a Candle (thousands)

26 different topic divided entries in the ”Forum”

Guestbook (one guestbook for each profile)

Links to different readings on and sites about death, grief and mourning

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For the ones we have got, loved, and lost

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+ 7

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”Death ends a life, not a relationship”

Deaths on Mindet.dk = Deaths leaving a “WHY?”

Stillborn children

Death of children and young ones

”Small feet leave indelible traces”

Mindet.dk fills a void for having marked or designated places for

morning and bereavement (after the funeral and beside the

graveyard): places for performing and displaying acts of mourning

in an explicit way which is taboo – at least in protestant countries:

a place where it is acceptable that it takes time to recover (or

never recover) from the loss (of a child)

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+ Places

The perception and interpretation of the

physical and material environment we find

ourselves in (Carsten Friberg)

Obviously the physicality and materiality is

of another order when we are looking at

mediated places

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+ Media creating places

Today’s new media are not just (re)shaping our sense of

place but actually producing new types of places and new

types of spatial experiences.

The media evolution in the new millennium has made it

increasingly clear that the borders between online and

offline places and activities are blurred and dissolved and

that physical and mediated places are becoming

intertwined.

It is the media that makes it possible to create Mindet.dk as a

specific social place with intimate relations between its

users and with a solid and narrow social framing: a

demarcation of an inside and an outside with specific and

place-defining social rules enforced inside.

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+ Materiality of a mediated place Marked entrances: individual links leading to segregated

‘rooms’ (the memory profiles) separated from the rest of the

site (and the web) Marked difference between and inside

and an outside

Personalized design: background texture, imagery and

colors, use of text, pictures, drawings and so on.

Personalized and ritualized actions (the process of mourning,

of remembering and (re)telling): texts and pictures ‘setting

the scene’ (texts, pictures about the death, the loss, the

funeral etc.) + diary-like entries (mostly texts (prose, poems,

song lyrics) often directly addressing the dead child

(continued life with the loss, with the sorrow AND with the

dead child as an absent yet present agent: creation of story,

of memories)

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+ Performative places

Not just places for performance – e.g. of grief and morning

and (re)production of memories

But also places which are coming into being by performative

acts:

by acts of demarkation, definition and demonstration

using the media as creative tool ’writing’ ritual practices and

relationships and thus Mindet.dk as both a place for

individual mourning and a community for mourners.

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+ Performative relation-building strategy

Community with the dead (on the individual memory profiles)

sharing memories of experiences with the deceased (if the person

have lived) in photographic or written form (pictures of birthdays ad

other events, ”do you remember when we used to…”)

different dreams of what could have been (” I wish you would have

lived to…”).

Sometimes reflected in photos of holidays with living children (“your younger

brothers and sisters would have loved to swim with you”)

Sometimes the dead child is transformed into a agent with special qualities,

like a guardian angel, family Fairy etc)

lighting a candle, e.g. at bed time, on red-letter days, as a confession

etc.: maintaining an ongoing communication with the dead child

The memory profiles at Mindet.dk are about keeping the memory and

the parents alive, keeping life meaningful, moving on

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+ performative relation-building strategy

Community with the living

reflections and meta-reflections on the process of grief (forums)

responses to other individual’s performance of grief: making comments, never

critical, always supporting:

directly building a relation to a particular person and her mourning process

(guestbook)/becoming visible as a parent to a dead child (“Rikke, Mother of

Albert”)

Addressing the dead child in appreciative and/or including terms

lighting a candle for others: contributing to the sense of community

Through the online social interaction the individual in grief can rehearse how to

represent and perform herself in different social situations. The media-created

sociality is experienced to be intimate because of the shared grief and pain however

at the same time because it is effectively demarcated from the person’s every day

life: socially it is a safe place. 17

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+ Writing community into being

+ Writing community into being

+ Time and place • Present: The place used for the

process of mourning: dealing with

the grief, the pain and the

personal consequences of having

lost a child (individually and as

part of the community at

Mindet.dk)

•Past: the place used for

documenting and/or inventing

memories of an either very short

life or a life not lived t all: very

thorough documentation

physical memorabilia (things

(almost fetish-like): photos,

drawings, hand and footprints

etc..)

•Wishful time: the place used for

construction of a life that could

have been lived; inscribing the

dead child in narratives about life

continuing, about new children

(siblings): an important part of the

process of grief and (re)estab-

lishing aa meaningful life.

+ The complexity of place

The memory profile Place for memories

and tales of the past

(recalled or con-

structed)

Community with the

living: the communi-

cation with other

users at Mindet.dk

through guestbooks,

the forum etc.

Community with the

dead: the continuing

communiction with

the dead child (in-

cluding some kind of

metaphysical dim-

ension

Place for tales of the

future: the wishes

for things that could

have been if the

child had lived

+ Part of the project: ”Sharing Death – online

performances of grief” associated with the

”Death, Materiality and the Origins of Time”-

project

Kjetil Sandvik, ph.d., associate professor

Crossmedia Communication

Film & Media Departement, Copenhagen University

Master of Dramaturgy and Asthestics & Culture

Dorthe Refslund Christensen, ph.d. associate professor

Event Culture and Experience Economy (everyday cultural

practices and ritualizations)

Scandinvian Dept. Aarhus University

Master of Science of Religion

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