Patria Soli (homeland soil) is a socially engaged art project for people who are not able to go back to their homeland at the end of their life. This project delivers soil from one’s homeland to a person.

 

People develop attachment to the land where they grow up, and the homeland forms one’s identity. It is common for many people to wish to die in their homeland. A great composer, Frédéric Chopin, who never returned to his homeland, Poland, until his death, carried an urn filled with soil from his beloved home country. Per his wish, when Chopin’s body was laid into the grave at the cemetery of Père Lachaise, a handful of the Polish soil was strewn onto his coffin.

 

Patria Soli was started from our care for issues around the end of life. We hope that the simple gesture of this project will provide a conversation starter for necessary, otherwise difficult, communication between people and their family. In this diverse country, one’s ideas and beliefs around death greatly vary, and, therefore, respecting these has become more important than ever. Our eventual goal is to indirectly and directly help people and medical professionals understand that there are various ways of dealing with death in this world.