Stone Circles, Wailing Women and Respecting The Dead: URNA at London Design Biennale 2025

What if we brought back stone circles and burial mounds? If we started to build ceremonial sites with contemporary, sustainable materials for our loved ones and the generations to come? Laura Robertson recently visited Malta to learn more about URNA, a proposal that provokes us to ask questions about death, grief and architecture…

The ritual of death is complex. When my dad James died, the funeral felt like a tipping point, a reckoning with his character and how I would remember him. His personality and character became summarised in my mind, in a strange way, as if all of his existence had stretched to this final point and a conclusion was needed. The body can only cope with so much grief; I felt extreme stress, anger, and a type of bereft unmooring. I didn’t know where I was. I found that my dad was an anchor in our family of three, so as that point in the triangle was removed, the strength left us. This new knowledge was part of the ritual.

For most, a funeral is the main focus of death, and so were the steady demands and considerations of others; how many could fit in the small chapel; the choreography of shaking hands and accepting messages; a flurry of communications in the lead up and a tapering off in the days that followed; the exhausting combat of other people’s irritation and regret; all amongst the dull concerns of administration – unpaid credit card bills, catering, choosing a coffin and its accessories (so many fittings and veneers!) from a glossy brochure.

His eulogies were short; the formal goodbyes felt so very quick in comparison to the procession and scheduling of the days following his death, from hospice to funeral home to grave. Now, I very rarely visit his cemetery, which is over an hour away on the outskirts of the city, but that’s not really why. I realised very quickly that his gravestone, well, isn’t him – it’s a marker, rather than a person with a story. The stone simply indicates where his remains are buried. What about his life, identity, choices? His family, his legacy?

These are the questions that URNA prompts. Exhibited through June at Somerset House for London Design Biennale 2025, and responding to the festival theme of ‘Surface Reflections’, Malta’s Pavilion proposes URNA as a long-lasting, more striking vessel for the dead. Suggesting ‘urn’, this imposing, sculptural sphere is engineered from limestone and cremation ashes, acting as a contemporary columbarium, or a monument or building with niches for funeral urns to be stored.

The Pavilion exhibits include the actual stone sphere, flown over from Malta, plus film and publications that document its manufacture and imagining its possible rites. Conceptually, URNA honours prehistoric artefacts and locations that are circular in shape: spherical stones found in Malta (in the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum catacombs), in Costa Rica (the Diquís spheres, named after the extinct Diquís culture); stone circles and burial mounds found in Ireland (like Newgrange); celestial stones engraved with astrological signs in Persian and Arabic (India) and swirls and discs (Scotland) thought of as early watches. Humans, here, positioned themselves within the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the wider cosmos, and our short duration on the globe.

Made by a collective of architects, artists, designers and curators – Andrew Borg Wirth, Anthony Bonnici, Tanil Raif, Matthew Attard Navarro, Anne Immelé, Stephanie Sant, Thomas Mifsud – URNA is as practical as it is conceptual. The material has real-life potential: created out construction waste and dust, and of an urgent need to preserve Malta’s UNESCO recognised asset, limestone, which has been excavated for thousands of years, and to make it sustainable for future construction. The placement and performance of the spheres, if realised, would need a big cultural shift; one that evokes and respects ancient practices; a new mausoleum site that is less about the immediate, shorter-term concerns of the mortuary, or a graveyard that may be subject to relocation or development, and more about enduring structures that are part of the landscape and the planet, that signal our place in geological, or deep, time.

URNA’s proposal includes Maltese architect and poet Richard England’s When I Die, taken from his book connecting solid structures to words, the timeworn to the fleeting. An extract:

IN THE PENUMBRA OF DEATH

ISLAND ROCK AND HUMAN BONE

MERGE INTO A WAXEN LIMESTONE WHOLE.

UNDER THE CREPUSCULAR SKY

AS EACH MIDNIGHT HAUNTS A MUTE CATAFALQUE OF DEATH

THIS FLOATING GRAVE

BECOMES

MY ASTRAL PASSPORT TO ETERNITY

The grave to eternity. Bones to sediment. I wonder about my own dad, or me, being treated in this way: combined with the ashes of other people, the dead from our families and wider community, in a way that symbolises togetherness for eternity. Would I feel differently about his absence? His remains? I’d go so far as to say that I might face his death differently if it was treated with poetry and import. I wonder how much say we have in these things today, beyond the epitaph. I imagine a hillside dotted with permanent, giant spheres marking many souls. In Liverpool, we often sing You’ll Never Walk Alone at times of unity or strife; a tender song that represents a football team, yes, but also recognises the Hillsborough disaster dead, and the decades-long fight for justice in the courts by their families. Death brings the living together, and acts as a meeting place to remember, grieve, and find joy in life, too.

In the accompanying film, the URNA sphere is halfway built, showing thin layers of concrete-ashes mix, that incrementally build the whole globe. At the bottom of a Maltese Quarry, three wailing women are hired to descend to the sphere and perform grieving. The women establish new rituals based on ancient examples; as well as pouring and painting on the liquid concrete with bear hands, they create a writhing body language, crying out, touching, curling like serpents around each other’s twisted limbs and entangled garments.

This naked performance of grief feels welcome as it does strange. What, in the end, can be stranger than our reactions to death? Suggesting a return to professional mourners is a direct acknowledgment of what we have made death into: awkward, taboo, sterile and remote. Grief is commonly treated as an infectious disease. I can only speak of British culture, in which the grieving – beyond the sympathy cards and kind gestures – frequently experience isolation. If the public again thought of death as a true return to the land, in a lineage and legacy of stone circles and burial mounds, what then? If the dead weren’t avoided but visible?

The URNA team asked students to make their own proposals, and, like stitching on a cloth, the resulting plans have monoliths, walls, towers and stones sewn into rolling hills, deserts and forests across South Africa, the USA, the Amazon and Iceland. This act situates URNA in real places, visualising it and making it possible in the minds of the viewer.

I recently went a step further and visited where URNA was designed and built. Twelve-storeys down into a light-filled quarry, I ran my fingers over the rippled surface of the sphere, and stood in the limestone dust at its base. I visited Malta’s 6,000-year-old burial sites and temples, its Roman quarries, and leaned over its fortress walls to look out at the sea. When at ruins anywhere, I love to feel connected to those people long gone; there’s something exquisite about this tactility, standing on foundation stone, or placing a hand on a pillar – tenfold when at a grand mausoleum or stone circle. URNA has forced me to think how differently I feel at an English cemetery, and what it might take, one day, for those two experiences to truly connect: the physical with the spiritual. Perhaps, as URNA suggests, it is a return to what our ancestors did so well: to make ambitious ceremonial structures at sites of geographic, cultural, and celestial significance.

Laura Robertson

See URNA, Malta Pavilion, at London Design Biennale, Somerset House, 5-29 June 2025, £22 tickets

URNA is commissioned by Arts Council Malta (@artscouncilmalta) and made possible through support from Halmann Vella, Gasan Foundation (@gasanfoundation), Embassy of France in Malta, Malta Enterprise, Visit Malta, KM Malta Airlines and all other partners

Images from top: URNA, render image 2025; URNA photo essay, courtesy Anne Immelé; research images from URNA instgram @urna.project; URNA film still, courtesy of Stephanie Sant, 2025; URNA photo essay, courtesy Anne Immelé