THE SKULL PROJECT is designed as a public art ritual, that is, a focused event designed to offer the public a place to experience and meditate on the deaths that have been occurring in Iraq.  Mr. Wirhun has participated in and helped create rituals based in Christian, wiccan, radical faerie and Santeria traditions.

THE SKULL PROJECT will host three days of “Feasting the Dead,” beginning on Sunday, October 31 (Halloween), at 3 P.M. This communal potluck will occur daily from 3–6 P.M. from Halloween through Election Day (which coincides this year with The Day of the Dead). Rites of feeding and eating with ancestors (the deceased) occur throughout many cultures, and are especially seen in the USA within Mexican and Native American traditions. At 5 P.M. Sunday (10/31) there will be a Radical Faerie ritual called “The Dead can Dance” to celebrate Halloween. The rituals at the same time on Monday and Tuesday will include chanting and drumming.

THE SKULL PROJECT will invite the many religious traditions practicing in the NYC metropolitan region to celebrate their rites of the dead during the time-frame of the project. It is hoped that this project will become a truly ecumenical experience.

THE SKULL PROJECT commemorates the lives lost during the Iraq conflict.  As such, the piles of egg skulls become a symbolic re-creation of the cemetery in which all these individuals would be interred.  As each fertile egg was once a life-to-be (an event), each skull egg becomes a life-that-was (an event).  The mounding of all these lives lost creates a place of awareness, and remembrance.  In such a place THE SKULL PROJECT calls the community to meditate on the nature of war and our participation in its creation and effects.