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Zombie Reflections: Afterwards, Bodies in Ruin – Staging – Esse

Zombie Reflections: Afterwards, Bodies in Ruin

Abby Maxwell

Digital Residency Open access Bruce LaBruce Pierre Huyghe Rochelle Goldberg Yasusuke Ōta
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Abby-Maxwell 
In this digital residency in collaboration with Érudit, Abby Maxwell explores zombies as figures of the living-dead in archives, a reflection of human and social anxieties. Zombies disrupt the boundaries of language, time and humanity, acting as broken mirrors of a ruined world and an unstable “I”.

The archive is a habitat for the undead—a site of extended being, in which a thing or an event does not end but proliferates onward. Its condition of withering is what is prolonged. The archive is a house of terminal decay.

Zombies exist in the archive as they are reproduced in cinema, art, and literature. The zombie affects/infects art: the figure’s genre mutates and swarms, both reflecting and transmitting certain aesthetics within the broader social sphere. Following the zombie along its varied formal and sensory trajectories trails those of the living—of the human; of thought; of being and its ends.

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