“Who’s buried here?”: #Gravetok between Archives and Aesthetics

Abstract

“Who’s buried here? Let’s clean this grave and find out!” With this voice-over begins one of the most successful videos of TikToker @gravecleangirl (2024), viewed over more than 6 million times on the social media platform. Within the video’s next minute, the decaying grave – and the name of the buried – is uncovered through the manual labor of scrubbing, washing and shining with an extensive range of fluorescent cleaning liquids and tools. Positioned as documenting ‘meaningful transformations’, this example forms part of an emerging genre of social media posts that is both applauded and criticised for its particular, mediated form of memory work. Predominantly featuring young women cleaning (seemingly) abandoned graves, #Gravetok not only points to gendered discussions of care labor but also challenges what forms of care are acceptable – particularly as it comes to caring for decaying infrastructures. Bringing together work on the negotiation of societal norms of maintenance (cf. Mattern 2018), the role of gender in shaping alternative narratives on life and death (cf. Westendorp and Gould 2021) and the complicated materialities of gravesites and memory (cf. Arnold 2017; Fraser et al. 2024), this contribution draws on a visual and discourse analysis of #Gravetok videos and comments to explore the construction of hybrid memoryscapes. While some of the videos function as an excursion into the life (and death) of the buried, other videos focus on the cleaning and revealing of decaying graves. In this tension between archival and aesthetic efforts, #Gravetok points to the complexities of navigating media, death and decay – and whatever might come after. Understanding the cemetery as a public site, and yet one that is only rarely mediated, highlights the intersections between urban and digital spaces – and the role of social media in discovering, uncovering and recovering everyday memories of ‘forgotten’ lives and ‘decaying’ infrastructures.