This body of work is in collaboration with Kate Laster, as Hevra Kadisha.
There are 2,976 feet of gutters lined with repurposed tombstones in Buena Vista Park. San Francisco’s cemeteries have been sites of contention, preservation, and eventually erasure.
While the cemeteries were mostly relocated, many tombstones were broken apart and repurposed for utilitarian means, rather than their original commemorative ones. The majority of Buena Vista’s archive is conserved while being hidden, as the broken stone’s text is facing downward, presenting an unexpected contradiction of preservation. The tension of visible and concealed surfaces is what makes the site of Buena Vista park such a potent metaphor for the inaccessibility of public memory for the dispossessed generations of San Francisco. STONES SPEAK / FIRST MONUMENT was presented as the first collaborative work of Steph Kudisch and Kate Laster as Hevra Kadisha, and is a component of Kate Laster’s MA thesis, Gentrification of the Dead: How the Displacement of Cemeteries Paved the Way for Rethinking Monuments in San Francisco.
STONES SPEAK / FIRST MONUMENT is a sound sculpture that depicts some of the fragments of tombstones in Buena Vista Park. This relief woodcut generates a sound piece composed of field recordings of BART trains howling and scraping through Colma, the drone of the Wave Organ, recitations of the Mourner’s Kaddish, sonification of data from San Francisco’s Municipal Records on burials in City Cemetery, layered humming vocals through a microKORG S vocoder, and audio from the site-specific performance STONES SPEAK.