In this digital residency in collaboration with \u00c9rudit, 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 \u201cI\u201d.<\/strong>

The archive is a habitat for the undead\u2014a 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.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Zombies exist in the archive as they are reproduced in cinema, art, and literature. The zombie affects\/infects art: the figure\u2019s 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\u2014of the human; of thought; of being and its ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In probing the Esse<\/em> and \u00c9rudit collections, I ask: how does an archive contain or reveal the undead? And, what can we learn about the living through inspecting zombies in archives, as well as the relationship across these two structures?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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ZOMBIE 101  <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The zombie finds its roots in seventeenth-century Haiti, where tales circulated of reanimated corpses, enslaved eternally, personifying the sheer violence of the French, and then the US, occupation. But the archetype of the zombie has been whitewashed over time, morphing from a victim-subject of colonial exploitation into a vector of otherness, reinforcing the centrality and sovereignty of the white, human subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
George A. Romero\u2019s movie Night of the Living Dead <\/em>(1968), one of the earliest visual renderings of the undead, is a point of origin for many character traits of the canonical zombie and its evolving genre. Zombies are described in the film as \u201cthings that look like people but act like animals,\u201d whose \u201csole urge is the quest for human flesh.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - George A. Romero, Night of the Living Dead, <\/em>1968.<\/span> The primary means of destroying the Romerian zombie is burning its body. Fire is the only thing that inhibits its otherwise infinite, ravenous pursuit of human prey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Throughout his work, Romero utilized the zombie as a figure of insatiable hunger in order to lodge an early critique of mass consumerism. Since the 2000s, however, the genre has taken on an overtly conservative sensibility; many pop media outlets use zombies as flat symbols for evil or some form of otherness to be destroyed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In \u201cThe Rezort<\/em> (2015): Zombies, Refugees and B Protocols,\u201d published in Cin\u00e9mas<\/em>, Emilio Audissino interrogates the distinct forms of meaning produced within the post-zombie-apocalypse film The Rezort. <\/em>He suggests that it can be read as a prefiguration of Brexit, which would take place a year after its release, arguing, \u201cMonsters are \u2018meaning machines\u2019 … and consequently horror films can be a telling barometer of the society that produced them.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Emilio Audissino, \u201cThe Rezort<\/em> (2015): Zombies, Refugees and B Protocols,\u201d Cin\u00e9mas <\/em>30, no. 3 (2024): 101.<\/span> The zombie, in its contemporary reproductions, acts as a mirror for the paranoia of the living. Its body, an unkempt mass of \u201cdirt, gore and human tissue,\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> carries a weighty archive of state anxieties: colonial paranoias, red scares, AIDS and other epidemics, refugee \u201ccrises,\u201d and so on. The zombie is represented as a viral threat that maps directly onto histories of \u201csocial contagion,\u201d a phrase encompassing all that might permeate a state\u2019s perimeter and claim to legitimacy. The zombie-mirror reflects the deterioration of all bodies\u2014of any entity that anxiously draws (and redraws, and redraws) lines around itself in order to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In an interview by Gary M. Kramer for Monstrum, <\/em>Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce speaks to \u201cthe whole doppelg\u00e4nger<\/em> thing\u201d present in horror persons such as vampires and zombies. \u201cThey are in human form, and they are a reflection of the living. Something that is corrupt within everyone resides in these monsters.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Bruce LaBruce, in Gary M. Kramer, \u201c<\/em>Bruce LaBruce on His Explicit Radical Cinema of Seduction, Otto; or, Up with Dead People, L.A. Zombie, and The Visitor,\u201d Monstrum<\/em> 7, no. 1 (2024): 31.<\/span> The wary intimacy between zombie and human is crucial to the genre; beloveds are infected, becoming vectors themselves. A zombie reeks of death: the secret of its condition of decay is exposed, exteriorized: its lost limbs gather in heaps. Its flesh rots. The periphery of the human is dead, too\u2014the skin that contains it sheds, becoming dust. The human body is a convoluted matrix of living and dying, not one and then, finally, the other. The zombie\u2019s proximity to death (and death\u2019s beyond) is essentially our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
EATING<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
LaBruce explains that \u201cdespite being disaffected characters who have no emotions, [zombies] are remarkably voracious in their appetites.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - LaBruce, in Kramer, \u201cBruce LaBruce,\u201d 31-32.<\/span> The zombie is propelled only by its profound hunger for human flesh\u2014a cannibalistic drive, if the figure\u2019s full arc of existence, its having-been human, is considered. Cannibalism is the absorption of life into un-death (exponentially, since a zombie\u2019s prey becomes undead in turn).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The slippery dynamics of cannibalism\u2014or, maybe, every act of consumption\u2014are explored in \u201cCannibal Actif<\/em>: The Artist Book as Threshold for Material Encounters.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Jo\u00eblle Dub\u00e9 and Mar\u00eda Casta\u00f1eda-Delgado, \u201cCannibal Actif<\/em>: The Artist Book as Threshold for Material Encounters,\u201d Esse arts + opinions <\/em>no. 101 (2021), accessible online.<\/span> Co-authors Jo\u00eblle Dub\u00e9 and Mar\u00eda Casta\u00f1eda-Delgado interpret Rochelle Goldberg\u2019s bookwork as a gutter, a place of encounter, a threshold at which bodies and other substances commingle. A work of intra-action, as conceptualized by Karen Barad, Cannibal Actif <\/em>inhabits \u201cthe line between consuming and being consumed, transforming and being transformed, preying on and being preyed upon.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> All of the relationships at stake in the work are characterized by permeability, \u201cthe loss of a stable distinction between self and other.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Leah Pires in ibid.<\/span> According to art historian Leah Pires, quoted by Dub\u00e9 and Casta\u00f1eda-Delgado, permeability also \u201ccharacterizes digestive networks, where the predator integrates the prey as part of itself, obscuring any clearly defined boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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This is the paradox of eating\u2014this integral, lytic encounter between eater and eaten. The zombie consumes that which it once was: here, the unparseability of predator\/prey is magnified. But all consumption derives from this relation. Eating, that absorption that sustains forms of life, is a primal threat to the enclosure of \u201chuman\u201d; every feeding is a crack in the foundation. Out of this crack grows the human\u2019s other, its shadow: \u201cthe mirror [that] touches back.\u201d9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Dub\u00e9 and Casta\u00f1eda-Delgado paraphrasing Pires.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
ENDING<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Zombies are associated with endings: their existence and spread cleaves a new temporal plane beyond life and death, signalling apocalypse<\/em>. The end of the world. But, zombies simultaneously trouble the finality that death promises\u2014the end of all ends, which adheres meaning to the very notion of time. The zombie proliferates in culture because it collapses structures of meaning. Its body is a threshold opening toward other times; a means to other ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What exists, remains, or grows at the end of the world?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In \u201cFukushima\u2019s Animal,\u201d the Berlin-based writer, critic, and art historian Carlos Kong explores the temporality and aftermath of nuclear disaster through the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Powerplant breakdown provoked by the Great East Japan Earthquake and its resultant tsunami in March 2011. The sheer magnitude of such a disaster \u201cchallenges narratives of crisis,\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Carlos Kong, \u201cFukushima\u2019s Animal,\u201d Esse art + opinions<\/em>,no. 87 (2016), accessible online.<\/span> Kong argues. In fact, the immensity of its destruction inhibits any possible narrative\u2014it precludes the very act of writing; precludes all language, refusing to be \u201cdigested, normalized, and forgotten.\u201d Kong traces the visual representations of the animal survivors remaining in\/after Fukushima in Pierre Huyghe\u2019s film Untitled (Human Mask)<\/em> (2014) and Yasusuke \u014cta\u2019s photographic series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima<\/em> (2011).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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In this void of (human) language, in whatever time protrudes from this world-ending catastrophe, emerges the animal to \u201cunwrite the possibility of moving beyond it.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> Still here, albeit in the gap of human recognition, the animal\u2019s body remains and reminds, a force that is a record of what has taken place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These animals are undead: proliferations of something in the aperture cleaved by the very notion of ending. Representing the animal decentres the human as the core of what is to be archived and rejects the normalizing violence of disaster narratives, forging space beyond the human\u2019s end(s). And, following Jacques Derrida\u2019s L\u2019Animal que donc je suis, <\/em>Kong argues that writing the animal \u201cundermines language by doubly positioning the animal as both the mirror of the human and that which the human always follows, evolutionarily and philosophically.\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> These undead are, to the human, both mirror and possibility: exceeding ending, in which all meaning is disarticulated, a reflection and an opening. These are the animals that \u201cje suis,\u201d as both \u201cI am\u201d and \u201cI follow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u014cta\u2019s photographs reveal Fukushima\u2019s \u201canimals and landscapes in parallel states of slow death.\u201d13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> It is a survival that is also a prolonged expiry; this existence extends the middle, the decay, which gathers at all edges of a death. These quieter processes belong to the world; the unhuman and the undead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ARCHIVE: ash, shard<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Jorge Luis Borges\u2019s The Library of Babel <\/em>(1941) drafts the design for a universal \u201cLibrary,\u201d the ultimate archive, so vast as to contain every possible book, including all those yet to be written. In meticulous detail, Borges describes its hexagonal galleries and spiral stairways, producing an infinitely unfolding structure. This archive of archives, which purports to contain the entirety of the world, produces in its wake another kind of archive: the shadow of what is written\u2014all that cannot be expressed in language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This shadow archive is \u201cthe very ash of the archive\u201d:14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Jacques Derrida, in Akira Mizuta Lippit, \u201cThe Shadow Archive (A Secret Light),\u201d Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) <\/em>(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 9-10.<\/span> the archive is constituted through its own burning. In flames, this other archive is produced, revealing the secrets of its former self. In considering Borges\u2019s Library, the film scholar Akira Mizuta Lippit wonders, \u201cIs the archive of the uninscribable, unwritable, and unrepresentable possible only as the destruction of the archive? … Which archive survives in the end? Which one remains, the archive or its shadow?\u201d15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - Lippit, Atomic Light<\/em>, 8\u20139.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Like the zombie, the archive tends always toward destruction and<\/em> is fundamentally indestructible: its withering body goes to seed, blooming in traces. The archive is a structure in ruin and a desiring body, neither living nor dead. It exists in disaster\u2019s rubble, the afterwards of its own ending.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Lippit writes, \u201cUnder the shadow, another form of life emerges, excluded from the archive that includes everything.\u201d16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 16 <\/a> - Lippit, 7.<\/span> Death is ultimately unwritable\u2014the nothing that all other nothings skew toward. In attempting to write such endings, this official archive pre-dicts and pre-scribes its own approaching disaster. Whereas the zombie is the disaster of the human, fire is the disaster of both zombie and archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The zombie drags death into the realm of the living, at once a force of ruination and a figure of the insatiable desire to preserve, to render a form of impermeable life. But the desire to preserve unfolds as death\u2019s perpetuity. As Lippit notes, the archive\u2019s temporality is \u201cfinal and finite, but also infinitely pointed toward the end, toward finitude, virtually final, infinal<\/em>.\u201d17<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 17 <\/a> - Ibid., 5. The emphasis is Lippit\u2019s.<\/span> Much like this archive in ruin, our recurrent mirror\u2014this surface that is both reflection and beginning; a mirror that touches back\u2014comprises fracture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In \u201cI am in animal,\u201d the Vancouver-based artist and art historian Marina Roy explores this titular phrase and its almost-palindromic form.18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 18 <\/a> - Marina Roy, \u201cI am in animal \/ L\u2019animal \u00e9moi,\u201d Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, no. 87 (2016), accessible online.<\/span> The I\u2019s capitalization is required both for the illusion of this false palindrome and for the compartmentalization of the human subject, another illusion, from the animal: the \u201cI\u201d in possession of itself. Roy writes, \u201cHumans recognize themselves only through viewing the animal, not by viewing themselves in a mirror.\u201d The human\u2014a category notoriously in flux\u2014<\/em>produces its self as \u201cI\u201d against the notion and imagined body of the animal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cBut in the case of \u2018I am in animal,\u2019\u201d Roy writes, \u201cthere exists a slight warp or fracture in that mirror.\u201d19<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 19 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> This broken mirror\u2019s shards reveal the deception required for the human to believe itself innately distinct from the animal. Perhaps the zombie is a shattered mirror, then; its shards lay bare the inexorably fractured condition of whatever peers in. Zombies emerge as the disasters of leaking cannibals and the creatures that animate and retain space for an entire world\u2019s grief. Following the zombie through the archive traces out a map of fissured, blurred relations across the living (all that which inscribes itself as such, all that hungers to write into order the animality of death) and all the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Links to the articles cited: Emilio Audissino<\/a> Gary M. Kramer<\/a> Jo\u00eblle Dub\u00e9 & Mar\u00eda Casta\u00f1eda-Delgado<\/a> Carlos Kong<\/a> Marina Roy<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":269271,"template":"","categories":[7063,1398],"numeros":[],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[7543],"artistes":[7544,2772,1862,2773],"thematiques":[],"type_residence-numerique":[],"class_list":["post-269273","residence-numerique","type-residence-numerique","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-digital-residency","category-acces-libre-en","auteurs-abby-maxwell-en","artistes-bruce-labruce-en","artistes-pierre-huyghe-en","artistes-rochelle-goldberg-en","artistes-yasusuke-ota-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/residence-numerique\/269273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/residence-numerique"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/residence-numerique"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269273"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=269273"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=269273"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=269273"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=269273"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=269273"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=269273"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=269273"},{"taxonomy":"type_residence-numerique","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_residence-numerique?post=269273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}