The Crypt
Photo by: Trevor Tarin
• November 2019 • Nevada
• Design • Fabrication • Installation • Experience
The Crypt was an installation commissioned for a private party at a Nevada Hotel. Participants entered our sterile and unpleasant Purgatory waiting room and filled out meaningless bureaucratic forms until it was their time to travel into the underworld.
Once invited into The Crypt by our Purgatory Bureaucrat host, the guests were greeted by Charon, the river ferryman, and offered a ride down the river Styx on our 13 foot wooden gondola boat.
The guests sat back in stillness and reflection while listening along on headphones to a 4 minute River Styx death meditation as the boat slowly rolled down the track, past collections of oddities, plants and mythical animals.
Gondola traveling on tubular steel dolly track
We used curved tubular steel film production dolly track for our river boat ride and built a custom dolly wheel base so our boat would roll effortlessly down the river under human power.
We worked in shifts and were able to share our river Styx boat ride experience with 300 people over the course of 3 days.
Photos by: Chayna Girling and Trevor Tarin
We undertook quite a challenge by building this installation on the 12th floor of a hotel, having to load everything in through a standard elevator, and comply with fire code in our materials and egresses.
Our boat was pre-built in Oakland in 3 sections, treated with NFPA 701 fire retardant, transported to the hotel, and reassembled onsite once inside the room.
At the end of the river, the transported guests exited on to a dock and were invited to linger and join other travelers in a cozy area for conversations about life and death.
We created a beautiful space of reverence and worked hard as Crypt Keepers to hold a container for guests to ponder the serious questions of what happens when we die.
Photo by: Trevor Tarin
This project was a collaborative undertaking by nine Bay Area and Santa Fe based artists, builders and story tellers.
The Crypt Krewe is:
Zoe, Liaka, Robot, Leo, Lucy, Theresa, Whitney, Adair, Poindexter
With additional help from: Maalis, Sean, Torben, and Andrew