A ‘Rave Coffin’ appeared in the empty South Philly lot that once housed the ‘Boob Garden’

Under the cover of night Wednesday, with the help of three young assistants she lovingly referred to as “the children of the corn,” South Philly artist Rose Luardo installed her latest guerrilla artwork — a casket covered in tie-dyed felt called the Rave Coffin — in an empty cement lot along Washington Avenue.

If you’re wondering for whom the coffin is intended, it’s you.

“It’s everybody’s coffin, this is everybody’s death,” Luardo said. “If you’re looking at it, it’s your funeral, it’s your life.”

But don’t get her wrong. Luardo doesn’t want you to be sad about it or anything.

“You live fun, let’s die fun. Instead of a funeral, you could have this fun-eral,” she said. “This is just taking death and making it a comfortable, approachable, delightful, rave-y experience.”

The coffin is filled with stuffed animals, comes with a small tie-dye bench for contemplation, and is equipped with a QR code that leads to a Google Doc called “Your Funeral.” I won’t give too much away, but among other things, the site links to accompanying audio of Luardo’s dad, who died in 2022, telling stories of his childhood in the Philippines, and it features Luardo and a friend doing fake ads in between.

“The commercials are for a used coffin service on the Boulevard, like Gary Barbera on the Boulevard,” she said.

Is Luardo the best? Boy I guess.

Ever since I interviewed Luardo last year about the Boob Garden — a furniture set she covered in breast plushies and set up in the same triangular lot on Washington Avenue between Passyunk Avenue and Eighth Street that was once home to Capt. Jesse G’s Crab Shack — I’ve been hoping she might do another unannounced show at what she’s dubbed “Capt. Jesse G’s Crab Shack Gallery.”

I mean, her first show there was obviously a smashing success, since the Boob Garden remained up and fairly untouched for months by residents, the city, and Mother Nature herself, all of whom were obviously titillated by the piece.

Even when someone destroyed the Boob Garden, images of which a friend captured on camera for Luardo, she considered it a part of the art.

“Apparently, some woman came on the hottest day of the year in a Jesus shirt with a sledge hammer. She was very angry. She was a great collaborator,” Luardo said. “She smashed it, put it into contractor bags, and drove it away. I was like, ‘She’s committed! My performance art girl is committed!’”

Luardo, who is 51 but likes “to say I’m 52 or 53,″ is one of my favorite kind of Philadelphians — someone who loves breaking the rest of us normies out of the everyday, someone who reminds us that the world isn’t all terrible, that it’s a strange and wonderful place and that we can make it even stranger and more wonderful.

“I think my overall approach to the Capt. Jesse G’s lot is that feeling of flicking through channels in the middle of the night when you’re a very young person and you stumble across something so bizarre you’re like, ‘What is this?’” Luardo said. “It’s an LSD reality.”

She created the Rave Coffin for a 2017 show at Practice gallery in North Philly (which also featured the breast plushies) and built it with the help of Jerry Kaba, a curator at the gallery.

“In real Philly cheapo-creepo fashion, we found people who were giving away deck wood because they had too much, so it’s really heavy,” Luardo said of the casket.

They “eyeballed” the basic shape of the coffin and Luardo ordered the tie-dyed fabric for it online.

“I was looking for something plush and cozy, something to elegantly die in,” she said.

At the gallery show, folks were encouraged to get in the coffin (you could close the lid or not) and put on a set of headphones that played the accompanying audio of Luardo’s dad and the fake used coffin commercials.

For several years, the Rave Coffin sat in storage, until this week when Luardo enlisted the help of her niece, Ingrid Rose Koppisch, and Koppisch’s two friends, Max Brenneman and Simply Val, who are all art students.

Luardo recently bought Koppisch Bjork tickets, so she kind of owed her.

They got the heavy casket out of storage and into Luardo’s hatchback Honda Fit. They strapped it in, but Luardo and her niece had to lie on top of the coffin to keep it from falling out of the back as one of the others drove the car 5 mph through South Philly.

“They were nervous. I said, ‘It’s OK, sometimes we do s— that makes us nervous, so we’re just going to go through it,’” Luardo said.

Luckily, the drive was short and the police officers who spotted them and made a U-turn, just kept on going.

When Luardo and her assistants got to the empty lot, they recruited some people who were walking by to help unload the casket.

“They asked what we were doing and I said ‘We’re making art’ and I got strangers to help us,” Luardo said.

She placed a pillow of the Disney character Pluto inside the casket and a keytar nearby, “just in case you need something to do.”

After setting up the Rave Coffin and taking some photos, the gang went back to Luardo’s house, where the others came up with the idea for the QR code and Google Doc.

“They did it at 11 p.m. while eating sardines and peanut butter at my kitchen table, " she said. “It was very collaborative.”

Luardo doesn’t encourage anyone getting in the coffin, but she doesn’t discourage it either.

“I don’t want anyone to get hurt but I don’t say no to anything,” she said.

But be forewarned, the coffin does not have a drain hole in the event of rain.

“It’s going to fill with water. It’s going to be so gross and I’m sure it will get moldy because it’s fleece,” she said.

Like the Boob Garden, Luardo doesn’t know how long the Rave Coffin will last on the streets of Philadelphia, but for however long it remains, she hopes it brings people confusion and joy.

“My greatest hope is just delight, merriment, and maybe complicated thoughts. Let’s take a second to think about our lives,” Luardo said. “Everybody is dying so quit your jibber jabber, don’t be petty, and don’t get hung up on s—. You’re dying, so use your time wisely.”

Luardo certainly is.