It is one of the most unknown parishes in Pontevedra, a small town that has been shedding its inhabitants until it is left with barely 700. We are talking about Cerpozones (Cerponzóns), near the town of Alba or Tilve, the northern corner where they have wanted to take a curious step to preserve their own history: place QR codes (quicktime response) on cemetery tombstones. You scan a tombstone in Galicia and a life appears.
“Linguistic restitution act“The O Chedeiro Neighborhood Association has been responsible for reformulating the usual text that can be found on the tombstones of the San Vicenzo cemetery. Why? Because they want the most distant generations, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, to be able to discover what story there is behind the names engraved in the marble. Read the past to understand the present.
The first QR premiered in the family pantheon of Juan José Esperón-Recareyneighbor, writer and secretary of the association. The scan opens a direct link to the blog ‘O Roque de Cerponzóns’, where the life of this family crossed by emigration, agricultural work, sociability in taverns and the daily history of the parish is documented. In this blog you can discover the life, for example, of Jesús Recarey Lorenzo, tram conductor and conductor who dedicated a life to daily mobility, or Carmen Recarey Cochón, owner of the Rums tavernthe social center of the parish.
Cerponzóns has also recently been the headline of several news stories for the documentary ‘A cardboard suitcase‘, as part of an initiative to preserve the memory and discover the history of this parish. The family has already changed the inscriptions on the tombstones from Spanish to Galician and this time they wanted to do something special, inspired by the Association of Officials for Linguistic Normalization of Galicia, which proposes using QRs with information in Galician about the deceased to remember names and experiences. Much better than a DEP
When the grave is an interface
As ironic as it may seem, this Pontevedra movement rhymes with many other actions carried out on the other side of the world. In Japan, the funeral company Ishi no Koe (literally “The voice of the stones”) has developed marble tombstones with embedded QRs that give access to websites with photos, videos, family testimonies and records of who visits the tomb and how many times said code has been scanned. These high-tech tombstones They are around $10,000.
And the same with automated columbariums in china: In cities such as Shanghai, Shenyang or Fujian, cemeteries have been offering QR stickers on tombstones for years that, when scanned, show obituaries, photos, videos and music of the deceased, in the context of Grave Sweeping Day (Qingming) and a growing culture of “virtual mourning rooms“Well, and the candles are so automated that they light themselves at night.
In Europe we can also find similar examples of this adaptation to the times. Denmark was one of the pioneers: In 2012, a tombstone company began offering porcelain plaques with QR codes for access to biographies within Roskilde Cemetery. The service cost about 100 euros and was sold as a way to preserve local stories and make the visit to the cemetery more interesting.
I remember, in fact, on a visit to Berlin that its three Jewish cemeteries already had similar systems for being able to follow the sentences as if it were karaokeand even some masons were changing or repairing the codes for more robust plates. Although it is easy to consider it an experiment to understand digital grief.
In the United Kingdom there are dozens of companies like Digital Gravestones or StoneCode Lite that sell packages of digital memorials. These include a website with photos, biography, timeline, cemetery location on Google Maps, condolence book and QR plate or weather-resistant NFC tag, with classic, minimalist or modern models and hosting from one to five years. There it is nothing.
The truth is that an easy-to-read epitaph has an imprint that cannot replace a QR code. However, creatives such as historian Frederick Meza, designer of Memorial QR, consider that this is a more useful and practical form of documentation, archiving, and also to promote necrotourism and historical pedagogy of relevant figures: dignitaries, former mayors, artists and party founders, etc.
Too much data for a place of mourning?
Songs, poems and digital condolence books, this model also opens a debate: what about privacy? That anyone can scan and access that information may bother certain family members who prefer to preserve and reserve their past. However, the digitization of cemeteries has been unstoppable after the pandemic.
In Spain, the cemeteries, with their cypress trees and flower crowns, are extremely quiet places where a certain decibel threshold is rarely violated. It is clear that QR codes are not just a gadget, but a way to expand the tomb from the name-date to the complete story, something very useful for anchoring biographies to local contexts, minority languages or family genealogies that were previously lost in scattered papers.
The parish of Cerponzóns has managed to manage its story through its blog, but the friction is still there: who decides what is told and who reads it? Or, more specifically: what happens when a public cemetery becomes an archive accessible to anyone curious, is it safe? It remains to be known how passwords are managed and what will become of technical continuity to verify whether great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren will truly know about their ancestors without entering broken links 50 years from now.
Images | Unsplash (Brett Jordan, Waldemar Brandt), Tourism of the Council of Redondela
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