The online memorial site Mindet.dk as marked place for performance of grief and construction of memories

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Online Sacralization
Danish memorial site Mindet.dk as a marked place for
performing grief and inventing memories
Places, People, Stories: the Mediated Places-session,
Linnéuniversitetet, Kalmar September 30th 2011
Kjetil Sandvik,
Associate professor, University of Copenhagen

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Mindet.dk: an introduction
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 Mindet.dk is the only Danish online community for individual performances
of grief and mourning over the loss of loved ones (“in memory of those we
got, lost and loved”) and facilitates well-known and easy-applied media and
interactive materiality
 Ca. 850 memories (individual memory profiles for dead loved ones)
 Light a Candle (thousands)
 26 different topic divided entries in the ”Forum”
 Guestbook (one guestbook for each profile)
 Links to different readings on and sites about death, grief and mourning

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For the ones we have got, loved, and lost

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”Death ends a life, not a relationship”
Deaths on Mindet.dk = Deaths leaving a “WHY?”
 Stillborn children
 Death of children and young ones
”Small feet leave indelible traces”
Mindet.dk fills a void for having marked or designated places for
morning and bereavement (after the funeral and beside the
graveyard): places for performing and displaying acts of mourning
in an explicit way which is taboo – at least in protestant countries:
a place where it is acceptable that it takes time to recover (or
never recover) from the loss (of a child)

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Places
 Theperception and interpretation of the
physical and material environment we find
ourselves in (Carsten Friberg)
 Obviously thephysicality and materiality is
of another order when we are looking at
mediated places

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Media creating places
 Today’s new media are not just (re)shaping our sense of
place but actually producing new types of places and new
types of spatial experiences.
 The media evolution in the new millennium has made it
increasingly clear that the borders between online and
offline places and activities are blurred and dissolved and
that physical and mediated places are becoming
intertwined.
 It is the media that makes it possible to create Mindet.dk as a
specific social place with intimate relations between its
users and with a solid and narrow social framing: a
demarcation of an inside and an outside with specific and
place-defining social rules enforced inside.

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Materiality of a mediated place
 Marked entrances: individual links leading to segregated
‘rooms’ (the memory profiles) separated from the rest of the
site (and the web)  Marked difference between and inside
and an outside
 Personalized design: background texture, imagery and
colors, use of text, pictures, drawings and so on.
 Personalized and ritualized actions (the process of mourning,
of remembering and (re)telling): texts and pictures ‘setting
the scene’ (texts, pictures about the death, the loss, the
funeral etc.) + diary-like entries (mostly texts (prose, poems,
song lyrics) often directly addressing the dead child
(continued life with the loss, with the sorrow AND with the
dead child as an absent yet present agent: creation of story,
of memories)

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Performative places
 Not just places for performance – e.g. of grief and morning
and (re)production of memories
 But also places which are coming into being by performative
acts:
 by acts of demarkation, definition and demonstration
 using the media as creative tool ’writing’ ritual practices and
relationships and thus Mindet.dk as both a place for
individual mourning and a community for mourners.

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Performative relation-building strategy
Community with the dead (on the individual memory profiles)
 sharing memories of experiences with the deceased (if the person
have lived) in photographic or written form (pictures of birthdays ad
other events, ”do you remember when we used to…”)
 different dreams of what could have been (” I wish you would have
lived to…”).
 Sometimes reflected in photos of holidays with living children (“your younger
brothers and sisters would have loved to swim with you”)
 Sometimes the dead child is transformed into a agent with special qualities,
like a guardian angel, family Fairy etc)
 lighting a candle, e.g. at bed time, on red-letter days, as a confession
etc.: maintaining an ongoing communication with the dead child
The memory profiles at Mindet.dk are about keeping the memory and
the parents alive, keeping life meaningful, moving on
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performative relation-building strategy
Community with the living
 reflections and meta-reflections on the process of grief (forums)
 responses to other individual’s performance of grief: making comments, never
critical, always supporting:
 directly building a relation to a particular person and her mourning process
(guestbook)/becoming visible as a parent to a dead child (“Rikke, Mother of
Albert”)
 Addressing the dead child in appreciative and/or including terms
 lighting a candle for others: contributing to the sense of community
Through the online social interaction the individual in grief can rehearse how to
represent and perform herself in different social situations. The media-created
sociality is experienced to be intimate because of the shared grief and pain however
at the same time because it is effectively demarcated from the person’s every day
life: socially it is a safe place. 17

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Writing community into being

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Writing community into being

21. + Time and place
•Present: The place used for the
process of mourning: dealing with
the grief, the pain and the
personal consequences of having
lost a child (individually and as
part of the community at
Mindet.dk)
•Past: the place used for
documenting and/or inventing
memories of an either very short
life or a life not lived t all: very
thorough documentation 
physical memorabilia (things
(almost fetish-like): photos,
drawings, hand and footprints
etc..)
•Wishful time: the place used for
construction of a life that could
have been lived; inscribing the
dead child in narratives about life
continuing, about new children
(siblings): an important part of the
process of grief and (re)estab-
lishing aa meaningful life.

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The complexity the continuing
of place
Community with the
dead:
communiction with
the dead child (in-
cluding some kind of
metaphysical dim-
ension
Place for tales of the
future: the wishes
Place for memories
The memory profile for things that could
and tales of the past
have been if the
(recalled or con-
child had lived
structed)
Community with the
living: the communi-
cation with other
users at Mindet.dk
through guestbooks,
the forum etc.

23. + Part of the project: ”Sharing Death – online 23
performances of grief” associated with the
”Death, Materiality and the Origins of Time”-
project
 Kjetil Sandvik, ph.d., associate professor
 Crossmedia Communication
 Film & Media Departement, Copenhagen University
 Master of Dramaturgy and Asthestics & Culture
 Dorthe Refslund Christensen, ph.d. associate professor
 Event Culture and Experience Economy (everyday cultural
practices and ritualizations)
 Scandinvian Dept. Aarhus University
 Master of Science of Religion