Possibilian Landscapes: An Exploration on Afterlife Dimensions

The normality of death has dissolved in the context of society through the passage of time. Death has been celebrated before in the past as a part of life. In the contemporary era, death is being revisited with a heightened social awareness wherein it is explored in different facets of interdisciplinary studies, ranging from technological to cultural studies. Because of this phenomenon eventually people will begin to ask: What comes after death? The afterlife is a realm of uncertainty and of possibilities. Different academic fields such as neurology, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy and the like extensively deconstruct, and in their own ways, define the realm of the afterlife. Its ambiguous yet mysterious nature provides us with the opportunity to further explore intangible and unmappable landscapes that are beyond human comprehension. Possibilian Landscapes imagines the idea of the afterlife through David Eagleman’s book on his philosophy on Possibilianism, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. It explores the possibilities of afterlife dimensions as a means of creating new spatial translations in architecture, which would eventually lead to the expounding of the discourse of the relationship between architecture and reality. In this book, she selected stories that possess strong cues in spatial visualization, with each story having different spatial notions that the author would like to probe, provoke and explore. The author questions reality through architecture using the afterlife as a platform, adapting and exploiting the energy of the contemporary wave of the afterlife as it sweeps today’s society.