Humps in the Garden of Social Media

The afterlife of our deceased friends on Facebook.

Christian Boltanski, Reliquaire, 1990. 16 black-and-white-photographs, 400 cookie tins, 16 metal drawers, 16 lamps.  © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014; photo © ZKM | Center for Art and Media, photo: ONUK

In 1966 the Italian writer Dino Buzzati published Il Colombre — a collection of short stories which, incredibly, have not yet been translated into English in its entirety ( he is one of those writers who historically, and inexplicably, has been dissed by the English literary world).

There is a short story in that collection titled Le gobbe in giardino (The Humps in the Garden), about a man (who later we learn is the author himself) who customarily takes a late night stroll through the garden of his house. One day he encounters an odd hump in the garden and inquires about it with his gardener the next day. The gardener informs him that the small mound is a memorial for a friend of his who died that day. The mound doesn’t contain the body underneath, but merely represents a marker. He helpfully explains: Ma qui nel giardino il prato si è sollevato da solo, perché questo è il suo giardino, signore, e tutto ciò che succede nella sua vita, signore, avrà un seguito precisamente qui. (Here the grass has elevated by itself because this is your garden, Sir, and everything that happens in your life will be followed by something in this location”).

The protagonist dismisses the explanation, but  over the course of several years the humps continue to appear, their size commensurate with the importance of the deceased person in the narrator’s life. “little by little”, the narrator writes,” my garden which once was smooth and easy to walk around turned into a battlefield (…) where each mound, hump, protuberance, relief, and growths correspond to a name, each name correspond to a friend, and each friend correspond to a distant grave and an emptiness inside of me.”

Most of us don’t own a private garden. But in the 21st century I bet that the vast majority of us (especially those of us of a certain age) are more likely to have something else where the equivalent of garden humps of deceased friends and acquaintances often appear: a Facebook page.

I am aware that Facebook is not what it used to be and that many have migrated already from it, but the site still reports having a not-negligible 2.85 billion users as of today, double to the amount of Instagram accounts and more than 7 times the amount of current Twitter users. So if you are reading this, chances are that you might have a Facebook profile, whether it is active or dormant. And so you might even have gone through the somber experience of having had at least one person in your group of friends pass away while their profile lives on. In fact, to clarify my previous statement about the 2.85 billion users, approximately 30 million of them are deceased.  It is further estimated that in about 50 years the dead will surpass the living  on Facebook — a fitting context for a 21st century screenplay adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, especially considering the fact that the business model of the site depends on the sale of information about the site’s users.

My first hump in the garden of Facebook appeared shortly after the majority of us in the art world had joined it, circa 2008.

Curator Ben Schaafsma was the program director of the Elizabeth Foundation in Hell’s Kitchen, where I have had my studio for many years. We bonded quickly, partially due to our joint interest in social practice and of the fact that  we shared an alma mater, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was one of the members of the collective InCUBATE ( Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and The Everyday) along with Abigail Satinsky and Roman Petruniak. He was a talented, smart, approachable guy whose mind was always active with new ideas; he was beloved by many.

On late October 2008 we learned that Ben had passed away unexpectedly (I was told he had been struck by a car while crossing the street). It was shocking and really sad news about someone who, at 26, was only starting what promised to be an important career.

There was an outpouring of grief for Ben on social media. People bid their farewells publicly on his wall. His Facebook page became a virtual grave onto which many went to pay his respects. Thinking of him at times, I would go to his page and —I believe this is something we all have done when thinking back of deceased friends of ours who still have a FB profile— go over his Facebook timeline, now fixed in time, where we can find this as his very last post (as you might remember, we all still spoke in third person on our posts during those early years, due to the prompt on the status update section):

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The second hump in my social media garden was Maria Alós. She came almost exactly three years later, in 2011. Although born in Cambridge, María grew up in Mexico City and was one hundred percent chilanga.  We met in New York sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s, and we became friends, both sharing an interest in creating interactive or relational works. She worked for a while at the New York Public Library, photographing documents for one of the library’s divisions (it was there where a few times she shot slides from art catalogues that I needed for lectures). She often collaborated with our mutual friend Nicolás Dumit Estévez in projects such as The Passersby Museum.  She eventually moved back to Mexico where she continued doing her work, and while we were in a couple shows together I more or less lost touch with her. In 2011 I learned that she had cancer; she was hospitalized that fall and received chemotherapy. She died at 38 to the shock and grief of many.

María is another person I think about often. In her Facebook profile photo she is embracing her young son, in front of what appeared to me a large smiling train or robot like the ones one would find in an arcade or a mall— an image that now is also frozen in time.

In profiles such as the ones of Ben and María one can attest to the love they left behind. Friends of theirs often post on the ether of their pages, as if placing virtual flowers, with comments such as “today I thought about you”, or, “ I dreamt last night that we were hanging out together.” When their friends write those words, they know that the one addressed is no longer there, but speak as if he or she were present. Are they summoning their spirit, as if hoping to talk through a portal? Are they writing to themselves, but unconsciously trying to make it more meaningful by writing those messages in public?

This desire to turn someone’s social media page into a real-life interlocutor is a completely understandable and natural impulse, similar perhaps to the one of those who speak to a picture on the wall. In some cases, some have tried to make the steps to instill a semblance of life into these inert images transmitted by a thin film transistor liquid-crystal display. In 2016 journalist and author James Vlahos made an AI chatbot out of recordings of his dad, who was in the late stages of Stage 4 cancer and worked with him to do around 40 hours of oral history- like interviews. The result is akin to a collection of videos and photographs of our lost loved ones, except with an interactive element where the chatbot can respond, Alexa-like, to greetings, make small talk, share anecdotes when prompted and even sing songs or tell familiar jokes.  I am not sure how I would feel about having this kind of resource to access the voices of my loved ones: it would be both bittersweet and haunting. But in any case, at this point in our era most of us don’t have the means or the foresight to preemptively create such a profile for every living person that matters to us.  For the time being we are left with the content they generated while alive, which in the early 21st century includes their social media footprint.

The sense of the deceased person’s continued presence is heightened by the very virtuality of those profiles. And it is perhaps exacerbated by the fact —as we can sometimes notice— that people might not be aware that this person has passed away. One Facebook (and real) friend of mine was a museum director who I worked under during the 1990s. He was not a savvy social media user, sometimes going on his page and publicly posting messages that were actually meant as private communications for a friend, for instance. He passed away two years ago, and I noticed that many people  (I assume not close friends, but professional acquaintances) continued to post on his page for things like congratulating him for this birthday and sending holiday greetings, clearly believing he is still around.  I have now been mysteriously defriended from his page (perhaps it now being administered by someone else and being turned into a legacy page?) and since no one but him would likely me admit me as his friend I will no longer have access to that form of memory of his.

In 2019, Dannielle Tegeder and I put together a small performance for Mildred’s Lane (the wonderful artist’s rural site and community experiment created by J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion) inspired in Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, this one titled The Delaware River Anthology (referring to the river adjacent to Mildred’s Lane).  Masters created a series of dramatic monologues in free verse where the dead speak about their lives in the fictional Spoon River city. Similar to the final act in Our Town, the voices of these characters paint a portrait of the hopes, the fears, and the imperfect myths of the everyday American life.  Recently I have felt that it would be fitting to rethink this project and make a social media version of it, in order to make sense of what these frozen timelines and profile pictures may say to us.

If anything, they incite us to try to make sense of the connection between the real and the virtual, and how often we tend to separate the two as if they were different universes, when they really are not. I understood that around three weeks ago, when I was visiting the Museo del Juguete Antiguo in Mexico City for the first time (a sprawling collection of old toys assembled by a single collector and put on display in a dusty 6-floor building in the Colonia Doctores) and, there, in a very strange way, María’s death suddenly gained a tangibility for me that it had not had before.  As much as we might be intellectually aware of those virtual humps in our garden, it is only when we feel them with our bodies when they truly become real.

Toward the exit of that museum I encountered a very familiar object: a large smiling train or robot like the ones one would find in an arcade or a mall.  As I later checked, it is exactly the same object in front of which María Alós and her young son posed in front of, more than a decade ago— the very photo that illustrates her Facebook profile.