Zombie Routine

Video (colour, sound), 8 min., 2019.
Special effects makeup by Bianca Boeroiu, with further support from Magda Vieriu, Iulian Stanciu and Diana Vasilescu.

In an unidentifiable derelict location, with metallic background noises that recall a factory or perhaps a railway depot, a nonhuman entity undergoes something akin to a beautifying ritual, but in reverse. Its appearance is reminiscent of countless zombie characters from Hollywood cinema, while the format mimics online beauty tutorials, in which a woman demonstrates how to apply beauty products in front of the camera. But here, the opposite happens: the camera witnesses the process of removing the make-up, the face being relieved of the prosthetics and special-effects make-up, which brings it back to a human countenance.

In the spirit of YouTube beauty tutorials, the presence of the camera is felt when it slightly adjusts its focus. As curator Anja Lückenkemper writes about the piece, “even the camera, the machine, cannot find or grasp the identity of what is in front of it.” (part of the curatorial text of Keep Forgetting to Forget Me). By using this format and imagery, the artwork is gesturing towards two narratives at once, as they overlap in the construction of a virtual identity or secondary self. This concept is defined by Sherry Turkle in her book Life on the Screen as a form of erosion between the unitary self, experienced by the individual on a singular level, and the multiplied self, experienced in collectivity. Although written in the mid 1990s, in the infancy of the internet as a social dimension, the text is significant in its gender-based approach to identity in the virtual world, with the author arguing that the secondary self is a form of personal creation.

To go back to the narratives that form this art piece, the first of the two is the figure of the zombie. Marcia Tiburi, one of the most active voices in contemporary Brazilian philosophy and the founder of the first local feminist party, partidA, compares the status of the contemporary citizen in neoliberalism with that of the zombie. Unlike the storylines of vampires or werewolves, whose kinship with the animal kingdom keeps them grounded in life and the passage of time, the zombie is “the illustration of a life lived as death, in which day and night no longer matter. The body of the zombie has no health or vitality, and blood does not nourish it. The zombie’s body acts hopelessly.” (A zumbificação da política brasileira) The vampire is a romantic figure (singular and strongly individualised), who for centuries lives on the cusp between life and death and is immortal thanks to an act of passion that recalls a kiss on the neck. Meanwhile, zombies (who always appear as a crowd), whose violent transformation takes 20 seconds and who have no chance of changing back, no hope of redemption, are an illustration of global neoliberalism. “Zombification takes place in zombie time, which is also digital time, in which everything is instantaneous, in which there is no time to be saved,” writes Tiburi. The body being devoured, she suggests, is that of democracy itself.

Part of:
Keep Forgetting to Forget Me, curated by Anja Lückenkemper
Spinnerei Leipzig, april-may 2019

And I Trust You,  works from the collections of Timo Miettinen and Florian Peters-Messer, Salon Dahlmann, Berlin
september 2022 – march 2023

PULS20, new works aquired by the National Museum of Contemporary Art MNAC Bucharest
january-april 2021 MNAC Bucharest
may-july 2021 Kunsthalle Bega