Place of residence: the cemetery

Cemetery: an area set apart for containing graves and tombs.

Yet, in the Philippines, in Manila and Cebu especially, families have made cemeteries their home.

The North Cemetery in Manila, established in 1904, covers an area of 54 hectares. The graves range from mausoleum to tombs, appartments and niches. The cemetery is a real labyrinth: a burial place for the dead, it is also a place full of life, with a population of over 2000.

The living conditions here are an improvement on those experienced by slum inhabitants or the homeless who survive in the streets. Some mausoleums serve as homes or, at least, shelters. There are several sources of running water on the cemetery grounds, and levels of pollution are much lower than in traffic-clogged city streets.

Each day, some twenty burials take place in the cemetery. And death brings jobs: men build and maintain graves, carry caskets during funerals, perform exhumations, cut headstones, drive tricycles taking visitors to the graves of their departed loved ones. Women take care of children, do housekeeping chores, cook, raise chicken, grow flowers, manufacture and sell candles. Children, like anywhere else, run around and play.

This project aims to show the everyday life of those who make their home in cemeteries and, in the context of overpopulation and severe housing crisis in large cities, demonstrate great resourcefulness, courage, and dignity and strive to live decently in an environment that, to many of us, may seem uninhabitable.