Memento mori: a walk through Soho

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Walking piece details

As an academic project for an MA course at Goldsmiths, I created an audio walk through the Soho neighbourhood of London based on the documentation of cholera deaths by John Snow in 1854. It is also an invitation to the practice of memento mori—to reflect on death (and life) in a neighborhood layered with the history of epidemics. Using the information in John Snow’s 1854 report, the audio tour takes the listener around Soho, providing historical information about the area and offering opportunities for contemplation.

To ‘invite’ people on the walk, I distributed small skull stickers with QR codes around Soho. These stickers stand in as ‘ghosts,’ or tiny visual reminders of ‘memento mori’ (‘remember death’ or ‘remember you die’ in Latin).
The walk is also available to anyone at the project website.