Stay inside. Close windows and doors.

Klaas — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 15:46:46 +0100

The "Zombie manifesto" was issued as a communiqué in the days leading up to 19 April 2008 in Overvecht, a grey suburbs of high-rise buildings in Utrecht, the Netherlands. A few months later, again, but this time in Barakaldo, a satellite town in the metropolitan area of Bilbao in Basque Country. Both times, this sardonic call to arms was all it took to summon up a crowd of people to voluntarily subject themselves to an elaborate collective fantasy, in the framework of the art project Stay inside. Close windows and doors.

After what could be called an extreme makeover session, in which the participants turned themselves into the resemblances of rotting and bloodied corpses, they joined each other in a sinister yet merry parade that meandered through the neighbourhood. Onlookers stood in amazement as this unseemly mob of zombies lurched its way to the local shopping mall, where it proceeded to invade the shops and mingle with the startled customers.

What was the purpose of these collective manifestations of nonsense? Was their implicit and ambiguous criticism of consumer society some kind of vindication of the critical potential of the citizen? Or did the willingness of the public to submit themselves to a rather undignified pursuit of the trivial and the profane suggest the opposite?

Rem Koolhaas once said that “Shopping is perhaps the last remaining form of public activity”. It's a somewhat dismissive verdict of the contemporary citizen, that certainly seems to ring true in the suburbs of our cities, where daily life has all but withdrawn behind the curtains of the private home. The only remaining site for the congregation of its inhabitants as a community appears to be in the shopping mall, where they take part in a ritual that unites us all: consumption, that complex ceremony in which need and desire are linked to lifestyle and brand identity.

In a sense, these indoor plazas are taking over the role of the public square as a point of encounter, simulating the liveliness of the traditional city centres. The atmosphere is pleasant and “hanging around” is stimulated. However, it is also only tolerated for as long as it complies with the doctrine of consumption. Everything inside the space of the shopping mall is planned and preconceived, and any appropriation or adaptation of that space by passers-by is both unwanted and prohibited. One can't just sit on the ground, and holding a protest inside is absolutely out of the question. The mall does not belong to its public, and their presence is strictly regulated, supervised and under control.

What started out as a surrogate for the city centre, is becoming globally ubiquitous. Not just because all shopping malls are alike, or because there are so many of them, but because it has turned into a model for the organization of other spaces. Publicly accessible areas such as train stations, airports or the entrances of large hospital complexes are progressively being privatized and commercially exploited, in answer to decreasing public expenditure. Even the original “authentic” city centres are being remodelled according to the values of the mall: cleaned up and made safe, they retain only those quaint elements that reinforce the city's Brand Identity, in a scenery that is dominated by the logos of H&M, Zara and McDonald's.

The shopping mall is a caricature of the Greek agora, the classical space of democracy. It surrounds the citizens with an illusion of freedom of choice, while discouraging unpredictable behaviour, effectively turning them into passive consumers of their environment. Nevertheless, as other open and multifunctional spaces in the modern city are becoming obsolete, it may be the only site where public assembly still has a latent political significance.

In this context, the zombiewalk should be seen as an experiment in challenging the status quo, turning the mall into a conflict zone, an arena on which, for once, a different scenario is played out. As a form of direct action, it takes its cue from the happenings organised in the Netherlands in the sixties by the Provo's, an anti-authoritarian movement that staged outrageous pranks to awaken society from social and political indifference. These playful happenings fused artistic performance and political protest, using elements of parody and humour, such as the use of blank banners in reaction to a prohibition on inflammatory texts in demonstrations.

But the zombiewalk is also indebted to the practice of psychogeography, a term applied to a wide range of strategies for exploring the city in innovative and unpredictable ways, in order to bring about a new awareness of the urban landscape. A notable example of this is the dérive, a deliberately aimless wandering through the streets, guided only by coincidence and subjective impulses. Introduced by the Situationists, another group of artistic and political agitators from the sixties, it has been articulated as a subversive response to the urban planning and functionalism of bureaucrats and entrepreneurs.

There is a fine line, however, between taking from the system, and being taken in by it. A few months after the zombiewalks in Overvecht and Barakaldo, there was another one in Sitges, organised by the fashion brand Eastpak. It effectively illustrates how potentially subversive narratives can be neutralized by their incorporation into a blatant celebration of a sponsor's brand identity. The Situationists in their time had already witnessed how ironic diversions of meaning could be turned back on themselves. They called it recuperation, the process by which radical ideas and images are turned into commodities and internalised by mainstream society.

But the complicity of counter-cultural initiatives with the prevailing social order goes beyond their vulnerability to recuperation. The dérive, for instance, is not unrelated to the tradition established by the flâneur, the “gentleman stroller of the streets” who emerged from the Parisian arcades of the 19th century. These arcades, narrow passageways lined with retail shops and covered with arching glass roofs, can be considered the conceptual predecessors of the department stores, and later, the indoor shopping mall. It would be fair to suggest, therefore, that today's stupefied window shopper and the disaffected psychogeographer have descended from the same historical figure.

Any effort to challenge the definition of public space as provided by the shopping mall, should acknowledge that we are all implicated in its construction. Indeed, it may be one of the few remaining sites where daily experience and the abstract inner workings of modern society intersect. The aim, then, is not necessarily to abolish the mall, but to reinvent it as a testing ground for alternative interpretations of the role of the “public”.

The parade of zombies through the shopping malls of Overvecht and Barakaldo could be seen as an ironic commentary on the deadly routine of shopping. But irony implies a kind of detachment from daily life, perpetuating the state of affairs by providing an alibi for conformism. To truly resurrect the flâneur as a figure of opposition to the alienating effects of consumer society, the zombiewalks depend instead on a total collapse of ironic distance. That is to say, they depend on the wholehearted and uninhibited surrender of their participants to the pleasure of the role-play itself.

In other words, Stay Inside. Close windows and doors is a seditious invitation to come out and play. Obscene, vulgar and free from moral constraints, the flâneur-zombie is a modern Jekyll and Hyde, a reminder that what ultimately separates the window shopper from the commodities on display is not glass, nor money, but social conditioning.

Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum

"It is us who are the dead: The Living Dead as a Walking Mirror" by Jordi Costa

Klaas — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 15:34:58 +0100

In the opening shots of Shaun of the Dead, by Edgar Wright, an intelligent comedy ignored by Spanish cinemas, a procession of sleepwalkers performs an everyday dance to the sound of the lounge tune Sunny Delights by the British band I Monster. Before the first zombie (strictly speaking) even makes an appearance, this prelude makes it clear that in our world of iPods, supermarket checkout queues and lives held in suspended animation at the bus stop, we all are zombies to some degree or other. This was the inevitable conclusion that the genre would arrive at from the moment George A. Romero, father of the living dead as the archetype of modern horror, turned the resurrected legions in Dawn of the Dead in 1978, his brilliant sequel to Night of the Living Dead (1968), into the mirror of consumerist inertia, voracious and insatiable even after brain death.

In Wright’s film, a happy echo of the TV series Spaced (1991-2001), the zombie plague also serves as a pretext for a critical portrayal of our contemporary culture of narcissism, in which the private realm always wins out over the collective sphere. In the first part of the film, while the TV news reports on the increasingly apocalyptic situation, the characters remain so engrossed in their day-to-day concerns that they pay no heed to the problem. In a sense, Shaun of the Dead anticipates on what Cloverfield (2007), Matt Reeve’s film that the producer J.J. Abrams converted into powerful hype, tries to tell us: that the subject has already become inadequate for decoding catastrophe in terms of collective disaster, expressing it instead as a minor apocalypse of the feelings. In both films, the action is driven by sentiment and the fantastic is reduced to mere context. These are not tales of survival but of emotional redemption, of reconciliation: perhaps what counts is not so much about saving your skin as it is about dying with a clear conscience and a heart at peace. A trend, in short, in keeping with that ego culture fuelled by the blogosphere, in which everyone's private little anxieties achieve (or strive for) global resonance.

Shaun of the Dead also dares to create a comic scene out of what remains latent in all orthodox (and serious) explorations of the cinematic archetype of the living dead: to cross an area swarming with zombies, at a certain point, the main characters resort to the strategy of acting like zombies themselves. What Wright does not make explicit is that the characters themselves already were, in a sense, the living dead. In other words, perfectly adapted to present times.

The horror genre usually draws a clear distinction between the zombie of Haitian folklore and the living dead as reinvented by Romero. Yet the two varieties of undead may be related in more ways than one. According to David J. Skal, author of The Monster Show. A Cultural History of Horror, zombies of the first kind were used as a political metaphor in fantasy films as early as the 1930s: the zombies of Victor Halperin’s film White Zombie (1932) raised the spectre of the rationing queues at the height of the Great Depression. This dimension of the zombie in those difficult times did not escape Katherine Hill's attention, film critic at that time for a San Francisco newspaper, who commented that they did not seem to mind doing overtime. In White Zombie, which boasts among other qualities that of being the first zombie film in history, they were employed quite literally as cheap (or rather, free) labour in the sugar industry. In other words, they were the proletariat in the hands of a vampire-like power, to which, fittingly, Bela Lugosi lent a Transylvanian face and voice.

Fantasy film has no room for tautology: a monster is never just a monster, but always the echo of a collective fear or the metaphor for a shared, contemporary angst. George A. Romero gave birth to the zombie as a modern archetype, but its characteristic traits did not emerge out of the blue. Richard Matheson’s novel I am Legend (1954) has been an acknowledged source of inspiration, although Romero may have been unaware at that time of just how prophetic this model would appear to be about the direction the archetype would take in his hands. Matheson’s post-apocalyptic vampires constitute the stage leading up to the evolutionary leap that would replace mankind: the so-called hero of the novel, Robert Neville, ends up being the monster of the tale, the exception to the rule, who cannot be accepted by the majority and hence must be exterminated.

The first film adaptation of Matheson’s novel—The Last Man on Earth (1964) by Sidney Salkow and Ubaldo Ragona—provided the iconography that inspired Romero in his Night of the Living Dead (1968), the key film that legitimised the zombie as an archetype once and for all, but in which, nevertheless, the significance of the monstrous still remained undetermined. There was talk—possibly rightly so—of the film as a reflection of the collective tension sparked by the Vietnam War, but perhaps it was not until the sequel that the political sense of the zombie as an image of the contemporary subject acquired its full import: the living dead are not the Others, but the premonition of our own immediate future. Or the echo of our own fundamental social structure.

Diary of the Dead (2007), Romero’s fifth film dedicated to the zombie archetype, takes a new spin on the subject: an exercise in the horror-vérité of the YouTube era, the movie recycles the living dead as victim-spectacle within a culture of narcissism that, if you will, is the opening chapter in the history of post-humanity (or post-humanism).

In contrast with the aristocratic manifestations of Evil, the zombie, commonly positioned on the far left of the fantasy imaginary, has evolved as a flexible metaphor: just recently Joe Dante turned it into the putrid reappearance of an awkward memory in his Homecoming episode (2005) of the TV series Masters of Horror. Shortly before that, the Briton Andrew Parkinson had slipped it into the hyperrealist parameters of the films of Ken Loach, in Dead Creatures (2001). It comes as no surprise that the archetype has also drawn the attention of Robin Campillo, scriptwriter of Time Out and regular editor for the socially engaged Laurence Cantet: in his début as director, Les Revenants (2004), released in English as They Came Back, he explores the theme as an economic and social problem.

In many ways, all these contemporary rereadings of the living dead are closely related to a drama that does not, strictly speaking, belong to the fantasy genre: J’Accuse! (1938; I Accuse), the anti-war epic directed by Abel Gance and a new version of his silent film of the same title shot in 1919, in which he added an eccentric supernatural finale. At the end of the film, his main character, a survivor from the First World War who has become an inventor, manages to revive soldiers who died at the front, most of them played by actual members of the Union des Gueules Cassées, soldiers wounded in the line of duty. The deformed faces of these war veterans was in keeping with the iconography of the horror films of the time made by Universal and represented a radical shift in the spectacle of monstrosity: the monster became a potential mirror for every viewer. The living dead were thus incarnated for the first time as a metaphor for that which any new order wants to exclude from the social equation: the guilty burden of every state at peace. The soldiers who died in Iraq and demand their right to vote in Homecoming are the natural descendants of the war ghosts in J’Accuse!

While not explicitly related to the archetype of the living dead, the Japanese film Pulse (2001) by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa presented an idea picked up by subsequent contributions to the zombie genre: regarded by French critics as the Antonioni of the new Japanese horror cinema, Kurosawa shows how, in our sedentary lives, staring at computer screens, the difference between the living and the dead is almost irrelevant. In Pulse, a website that shows real suicides filmed by webcam becomes both a centre of attraction and a source of infection. Through the computer screen, the world of the dead infects that of the living, since the living have stopped being alive and have become what the Lacanian Slavoj Žižek terms the “residual organic element” of existences that have crossed over to the other side of the looking glass, transferring their cognitive content to the virtual realm. In other words, the realm of the immaterial, of the spectral.

In the credits of the remake of the unavoidable Dawn of the Dead (1978), directed by Zack Snyder in 2004, a suggestive, almost subliminal, association is made between the indiscriminate irrational anger of the living dead and the suicidal nature of Islamic terrorism: a shot of devout Muslims praying in the direction of Mecca appears amid the cocktail of images that form a picture of chaos, to the sound of an apocalyptic song by Johnny Cash. The living dead thus add a new signification to their polysemic nature: in some ways, the zombie is al-Qaeda.

It is hardly a coincidence, therefore, that the zombie invasion should figure as a leitmotiv of so many flash mobs, often convened for the purpose of high-spirited anti-consumerist activism. In contrast, though, it is curious that zombies should serve as nothing more than an exercise in style for Danny Boyle in 28 Days Later (2002): 28 Weeks Later (2007), the sequel directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, demonstrates that, sometimes, a spin-off can go where the original falls short by presenting the zombie (or his viral likeness) as the one who is most painfully alive in the dead time of reconstruction and new world orders.

Jordi Costa

Text by author and journalist Jordi Costa, written for his presentation during the Jornadas Zombie - Seminar.

"Unconscious Consumption: Anatomy of Zombie Life" by Jaime Cuenca

Klaas — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 15:28:28 +0100

The modern zombie, as characterised by George A. Romero, is a lethal machine whose sole purpose is to consume fresh human flesh. That which distinguishes it from any other creature can be described using the expression unconscious consumption. In this essay, I shall develop this argument and attempt to show its surprising validity as one of the central traits of our way of life. With regard to the physical characteristics of zombies and their patterns of behaviour, I base myself on The Zombie Survival Guide (hereinafter ZSG) by Max Brooks; in my interpretation of the modern conditions of life, I shall follow above all the work of Zygmunt Bauman.

From the moment zombies are reanimated, they busy themselves with consuming human flesh. Their limited intelligence seems to prevent them from engaging in any activity other than wandering aimlessly and attempting to eat every human being they come across. Zombies are consumers, above all, but with some very particular characteristics: theirs is a voracious and compulsive consumption, a primary (and single) urge that determines their conduct to the point of excluding any other pattern of behaviour. Films have repeatedly shown how the bonds of family or friendship are incapable of checking zombies’ compulsion to consume. Secondly, their consumption is not indiscriminate: zombies eat fresh meat (in other words, the flesh of the living or of recently dead corpses), preferably human. Flesh that has begun to putrefy is rejected, explaining why they do not attack each other. The third characteristic that defines zombies is uselessness. They are reanimated cadavers and hence have none of the functions of living organisms. Their respiratory and digestive systems are completely pointless: they continue to breathe and eat ceaselessly, yet this is of no physical benefit to them since their bodies are incapable of regenerating themselves.

We too are consumers. We live in a society that demands from all its members the capability and the will to consume. Consumerism has spread beyond the narrow confines of the shopping centre and has come to shape our entire lives. Accordingly, Bauman (2001) states that, whatever we do, we behave as full-time consumers. Our whole life is a constant choice between various seductive offers that promise to make us unique, genuine, happy. We are constantly constructing our identity through the wide range of options which, thanks to consumerism, are all open to us bar one: the option not to consume. This is, therefore, a compulsion no less voracious or absolute than that of the zombie.

This omnipresent choice of various consumer options must, moreover, be continuously renewed, since its driving force is not the satisfaction of particular needs but the desire for new experiences. The drive for the unknown or more intense experiences can never achieve a lasting state of rest, because all that is needed to set it in motion, is for the options for consumption to be new. Thus, we demand of our commodities the same degree of freshness that the zombie seeks in its prey. The slightest sign of ageing makes these objects incapable of assuaging our compulsion to consume, just as any trace of putrefaction taints flesh in the eye of the zombie. If we are desperate in our search for newness, it is because we are equally desperate in our flight from ageing, which is, when all is said and done, the human condition. Zombies also flee from their condition, which is death, and shun in what they consume the signs of putrefaction that betray its presence.

Together with voracity and freshness, we pointed out a third trait of zombie consumption, its uselessness. The eating of flesh by zombies does not fulfil its natural purpose: to nourish. Neither does our consumption fulfil its intended purpose. However, this is not a flaw but the very manner in which consumerism operates. Consumer society legitimises itself by promising to satisfy human desires, but can only maintain itself by never fulfilling them entirely. The inability of consumption to truly lead to personal realisation is, as Bauman explains (2005), the very premise of its continuity.

The most typical quality of zombies ever since their Haitian origins is their lack of consciousness. In his radical transformation of zombies, George A. Romero respected this trait. How is it possible, then, to reconcile seemingly intentional behaviour—an attack—with a complete lack of consciousness? The ZSG explains this apparent mismatch on the grounds of instinct: the compulsion to consume human flesh is imprinted in zombies like an instinct that cannot be altered, qualified or denied in any way. Thus, this lack of consciousness seems to reveal another distinctive feature. In the first place, it indicates that the behaviour of zombies is not a product of their will (perverse or otherwise). Secondly, their actions are not the outcome of any kind of rational planning. The ZSG, for example, states that zombies hunt in a random manner.

Can it be said that the consumer’s behaviour is involuntary? Is it not true that the shopping centre presents itself as the most convenient place to acquire anything we might desire? The consumer not only has access to an almost unlimited array of goods and services but can, moreover, in every instance choose from a wide range of companies that compete on price and quality. There is only one option he is forbidden, and that is to quit this arena of free choice. In other words, one cannot choose not to choose. The incapability to consume, deliberate or otherwise, leads to a loss of the means required to construct your individual identity and to achieve social approval. The very act of consumption cannot, therefore, be regarded as the outcome of a conscious and voluntary decision on the part of the individual but instead as the expression of an internalised obligation, of a compulsion.

As to what to consume itself, the individual has, in principle, complete freedom of choice: nobody will try to prevent him from deciding on whatever appeals most to him. This very choice of words, however, reveals that the criteria on which his decision is based are loaded. The consumer is constantly on the receiving end of messages that attempt to influence his decision by giving precedence to certain factors over others. Swift, impulsive and thoughtless consumption is favoured over rational planning, which is thwarted in every possible way. It is a well-known fact that all material and symbolic resources of shopping centres combine to achieve this conditioning. Medium and long-term considerations and fixed, predetermined decision-making criteria are contrary to the ideal type of consumer; desire is expected to be the sole driving force of his behaviour.

At first sight, it would seem that any kind of desire is alien to zombie behaviour. However, if we accept Bauman’s proposition (2004) that desire is an impulse to absorb otherness, appropriating it through consumption, thereby eradicating the affront of its very presence (which is simultaneously attractive and repulsive), it becomes apparent that this impression is mistaken. To zombies, this otherness is represented by the living, which they attempt to absorb through consumption marked by a lack of consciousness. In other words, consumption that is involuntary and unplanned. As for us, we run from ageing, a destiny we know to be inevitable, by consuming products that are always new (that is to say, they never age) in a continuous process of compulsive and capricious choice. Our hunting pattern, as described by the ZSG, is no less random than that of zombies, nor is our consumption any less destructive.

The analysis of the expression unconscious consumption, which sums up the specific traits of zombies, reveals a significant analogy to some of the central characteristics of our own way of life. Regardless of the specific intentions of film directors, comic artists and video-game programmers who have created and spread the figure of the zombie, it certainly presents an astoundingly effective metaphor for the current conditions of existence. The zombie embodies some of the deepest fears of our society as well as some of its most shameful fascinations. We are terrified by the raging chaos that we occasionally glimpse in the order of our lives, an order based on the—unceasing and unsatisfying— consumption of the new, an order that reproduces itself with the efficiency of the viral epidemics that structure the plot of the latest works in the zombie genre. The morbid attraction of extreme and gratuitous violence seems to respond to our search for an emotional thrill capable of jolting us out of the profound apathy that we have been plunged into by the consumerist apotheosis of uniformity, brought to us under the colourful banner of novelty. The zombie, a gratuitous butcher par excellence, offers us the immoral pleasure of this thrill, without the actual danger of real violence.

It is the monstrous projection of our selves that we contemplate with such morbid delight on the cinema screens. And it is not just monstrous in the usual sense of the word, but also in the etymological sense, which goes back to the Latin monstrare. The zombie shows us what we are and dare not see, that part of us we do not wish to recognise as our own. If we listen to its macabre message, perhaps we can honour that most significant distinction between reality and metaphor: whereas the zombie pandemic is always presented with natural fatalism in film, the dizzying spread of our consumerist way of life is a social phenomenon. And what distinguishes the social from the natural, let us not forget, is its artifice, engendered by human beings and thus open to change by them.

Jaime Cuenca

Bibliography

Bauman, Z.: Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Issues in Society). 2nd edn., Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 2004.
Bauman, Z.: Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001. Bauman, Z.: Liquid Love. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2004.
Bauman, Z.: Liquid Life. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2005.
Brooks, Max: The Zombie Survival Guide. Three Rivers Press, New York, 2003.

Text by author and philosopher Jaime Cuenca, written for his presentation during the Jornadas Zombie - Seminar. This article is part of the thesis Globalisation and Its Cast-offs: Order and Exclusion in Zygmunt Bauman, supported by the Basque Government with a pre-doctorate grant since 2005.

Hareng Saur: Ensor and contemporary art

Klaas — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:38:48 +0200

A video of the project "Stay inside. Close windows and doors" has been selected for the exhibition Hareng Saur: Ensor and contemporary art, to be shown in Contemporary Art Museum SMAK in Ghent. Opening is on Saturday the 30th of October, at 14:00 in the Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition runs until the 27th of February.

Consumer society and the zombie apocalypse

Iratxe — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:55:41 +0100

When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground, we better have a good reason for getting up. If we don't, it makes no difference whether we stay inside and go back to sleep.

This website is a wake up call. It is also a collection of texts, photos, videos in memory of the events that happened in such deceivingly unremarkable places as Overvecht and Barakaldo, where hundreds of zombies heeded that wake-up call and took to the streets to invade the shopping malls, joining a melancholic revolution without leaders, and sense of direction.

Background:

Stay Inside. Close windows and doors is a project by the artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum that looks at the role of commercial centers and shopping malls in the social fabric of the suburbs and municipalities at the fringe of cities.

Taking the zombie as the ideal character for a roleplay about life in the modern city, the artists organised two Zombiewalks, inviting neighbourhood residents to join them in a morbid parade that lead to the local shopping malls, where the participants, dressed up like bloodied corpses, would mingle with the startled customers, in a collective action between performance, dérive and street theatre.

From January to April 2008 the artists worked in Overvecht, a suburb of Utrecht in the Netherlands, where they organised the Overvecht Zombiewalk, commissioned by the Art Council of Utrecht (In Overvecht), in collaboration with Casco projects.

In Barakaldo, a sattelite town of the Greater Metropolitan Area of Bilbao in Basque Country, the artists worked together with consonni on the Marcha Zombi Barakaldo which took place on the 14th of June 2008. A few months earlier, they had organised a Zombie Seminar, with the philosopher Jaime Cuenca Amigo, the cinema critic Jordi Costa, the artist and cyberfeminist Laurence Rassel and the organisers of the Madrid Zombiewalk (Gorka Arranz and Sephiroth).

These events have provided the content for the final publication: "Quédense dentro y cierren las ventanas - Stay inside. Close windows and doors", edited by the artists and published by consonni.

Bookpresentation of ‘Stay Inside. Close Windows and Doors’ + screening ‘Dawn of the Dead’ at Schijnheilig

Klaas — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:53:51 +0200

Zondag 4 April / Sunday April 4th, Schijnheilig presents: Bookpresentation ‘Stay Inside. Close Windows and Doors’,
followed by the screening of George A. Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (1978).

A night of gore, zombie slapstick and alienated entertainment!

Ever since the release of George A. Romero’s zombie-epic Dawn of the Dead, the zombie has become a comical figure of cultural critique. In Romero’s film, zombies wandering aimlessly though a suburban shopping mall serve as a grotesque representation of contemporary consumerism and alienation. Presently, artists Klaas van Gorkum and Iratxe Jaio have started their own brand of zombie critique, inviting the neighbors of Overvecht (Utrecht) to join them on Zombie parades to the local shopping mall. They have now published the book ‘Stay Inside. Close windows and doors’ and Klaas will join us to speak about their experiences.

Programme:

20:00 Doors open
20:30 Book presentation: ‘Stay Inside. Close windows and doors’, presented by Klaas van Gorkum.
21:15 Break
21:30 Screening of George A. Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (1978)

More on the project:
“Stay Inside. Close windows and doors” is a project by the artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum that presents the zombie as a distorted image of the exemplary citizen, to address ideas of multitude, consumerism, dystopia, alienation and participatory practices. The artists organised two Zombiewalks, inviting neighbourhood residents to join them in a morbid parade that lead to the local shopping malls, where the participants, dressed up like bloodied corpses, would mingle with the startled customers, in a collective action between performance, dérive and street theatre.

These events have provided the content for the final publication: “Quédense dentro y cierren las ventanas – Stay inside. Close windows and doors”, edited by the artists and published by consonni. It contains texts written by, among others, the cinema critic Jordi Costa, the philosopher Jaime Cuenca Amigo, the director of The Showroom in London Emily Pethick, the artistic director in Fundación Tapies (Barcelona) Laurence Rassel, and a comic by Maaike Hartjes.

For more on the project, see: www.zombies.parallelports.org

Entrance is free
Schijnheilig, Passeerdersgracht 23, Amsterdam www.schijnheilig.org

Bookpresentation in Hormiga Atómica, Pamplona-Iruñea

Admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:11:09 +0100

Presenting the book in bookstore Hormiga Atómica in Pamplona-Iruñea (C/ Curia 4) with one of the authors, the philosopher Jaime Cuenca Amigo and María Mur Dean from consonni.

Bookpresentation in Joker Comics, Bilbao

Admin — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:07:07 +0100

Presenting the book in bookstore Joker Comics in Bilbao (Alda. Urkijo, 27) with the artists and editors of the book, Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum, and Nerea Ayerbe Elola from consonni.

Bookpresentation in Ochoymedio, Madrid

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:00:50 +0100

Presenting the book in bookstore Ochoymedio in Madrid (C / Martin de los Heros, 11), with one of the authors, the film critic Jordi Costa, and as guest the film director Nacho Vigalondo, together with María Mur Dean from consonni.

Zombie Bike Ride in Amsterdam

Iratxe — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:31:49 +0100

The Amsterdam Rebel Clowns invites you to join a Wild Zombie Bike Ride, at 19.00 in the Cinema bar, OT301 Overtoom 301, Amsterdam.

Take your oldest, dustiest clothes and your bike with you. Facial paint and blood will be taken care of.

In times of capitalist crisis our city breaks further apart into pieces: areas where you should shop-shop-shop, areas for drinks and allowed fun, areas to sleep and watch TV and expanding areas with just boring offices (and many of them empty...). Join a critical mass of Zombies and bring Amsterdam back to life!

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