What is the afterlife? A floating elsewhere? A reckoning? Most cultures propose one: heaven, reincarnation or a slow return to the soil and stars. But these aren't just beliefs about what awaits us beyond our earthly shells. They mirror what we value, fear and hope for, as we live. The afterlife is less an ending than a continuation, really: how we, our possessions and our fragments linger or reform into states beyond us.

Take architecture. Its afterlives are made of egoes, glass and concrete, and of learnings and reapplications. The Hungarian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale stages a defunct architecture studio replete with unbuilt dreams. There Is Nothing To See Here, it declares wittily. Yet, it insists that knowledge doesn't perish. It can be exported into brilliant second acts of creativity. The book 'Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism', traces the under-documented and collaborative

networks of women in modernist architecture. We learn that afterlives don't always wait for death to begin; they emerge in the footnotes, the background, the margins, through drawings, diaries and film, resisting, inspiring. In 'Monomania', Fiona Tan curates a constellation of fixations: cabinets filled with obsessive collections, from insects to political memorabilia—not lifeless, but paused, contained. The artist's mise-en-scène at the Rijksmuseum questions what happens when we look too long, too hard. The afterlife here is an unshakable thought, a loop, a compulsion.

Perhaps the afterlife is not a place but a process, a way of re-entering or experiencing time differently. Through reuse, re-reading and quiet obsession, we find that nothing disappears. It mutates, it persists, it awaits. What, then, are we already living the afterlives of?