Cemetery Archipelago gathers together some researchers at the University of Gothenburg who are working on topics that have some connection to questions of death and dying. Initially the researchers considered the site of exhibition—the research pavilion situated in Venice and the wider lagoon—and the imaginative connections of the city to different themes of death, as a possible framing device. However, a tension emerged between readings of the site through: an idea of representation—something standing in the place of something else; an idea of expression—the broadly ‘process ontology’ conception of nature-culture and vibrant matter as in some sense ‘self-narrating’; and the site as simple contingency and therefore not centrally relevant to the disclosure of the various research projects assembled under the heading “Cemetery Archipelago”. It was resolved to present the research as a series of modules articulated through a common device (compressed accounts of work in a system of simple research posters) interspersed with a display of objects (the infant wrapping cloth) and three wall-mounted video works. Additionally, two workshops were organised within the framework of the display: art and necropolitics (part of the international freestanding course Introduction to Contemporary Art & Politics) and ‘Material Encounters’ 20–21 August, a two-day programme that included a concert-lecture discussions, presentations on materiality, archipelagic thinking, and the intertwined relationship between humans and soil. The later event was realised in cooperation with two of the other research cells in the pavilion: TERRITORIES :: DIALECTS and TRACES FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE: SOIL. Through the assembling of discrete research projects (that in some way mobilized the question of mortality, the dead body and the necropolitical) an important tension emerged early on between research that uses a “politics of representation” approach and research informed by ideas of “nature-culture,” “expression” or “process” ontologies, and “vibrant matter”. This is indicative of a wider tension within the contemporary art field, and within debates on artistic research, between (i) different ontological commitments; (ii) radically different ways of construing aesthesis and the aesthetic; and (iii) different epistemic orientations vis-à-vis the construction of artistic categories and practices. On a formal level, it was resolved to adopt a quiet and low-production-value strategy, informed by practical and resource constraints, and by the developmental nature of the project (i.e., not presenting ‘finished’ projects). This was also informed by the recognition that against the backdrop of a busy spectacular art world exhibition festival, a modest approach to showing and telling was appropriate. There was also an intent to play with the established convention of the ‘research poster’ in a way that creates moments of reflexivity in respect of exhibitionary dynamics (e.g., text explicitly addressing the demands made on the viewer’s time in the viewing / reading of the works; material describing moving image works while withholding actual screening of the work in question; presenting photographic documentation of objects in conjunction with the objects, and underlining the potential redundancy and performative contradiction in this operation.) In addition to the exhibition display a further document and exhibitionary device was elaborated for the ‘after-life’ of the expired exhibition in the form of a short video, which in turn will be exhibited as part of an event evaluating the overall project of the research pavilion.