You survived: What now?
What happens after Termine, Einde, The End, as the screen goes black, the credits rolls, and the somber music playing? You realise this will need collective imagination, so you set up a writers room and sit down to start writing…
We need to talk about The End. Even if, especially because, no one wants to. While the pandemic, the environmental crisis, war and various other apocalyptic world crises are fuelling a sinking despair and denial, we are overlooking small but radical gestures of hope and self-empowerment, and neglecting to develop a vision of what we *do* want.
“You Survived, What Now?” is a writer’s room and workshop inviting participants to rescript the end. Through facilitated prompts and/or workshops participants are invited to shift their focus from the apocalypse to considering what an ending offers — an opportunity for something new — and what they would like to do with such an opportunity. The writer’s room uses the zombie flick as a well-known popular entertainment form to both emphasise the apocalyptic quality of the present, as well as to shift participants into a fictional realm where creative and fanciful responses take precedence over being stuck in the prescribed scripts of the present.
Writers Room
POV: It's 2020 and it’s been a long year of not knowing what is news and what is zombie flick. After months in lockdown, interspersed with zoom conversations about colonialism with an infectious disease specialist, you make a supercut of the undead tropes that play out in pop culture and public health. Just days after it’s installed in a MU Hybrid Art Gallery, Mark Rutte calls another lockdown and the exhibition is closed. You sink into a haze of not knowing whether you’re inside or outside, which vaccine booster you've had, and whether anything ever made sense before the pandemic? Fast forward to 2023 and the pandemic is officially over but the virus is still making its rounds, as are all the undead stigmas and prejudices that come with infections — as played out again with the Mpox outbreak. You start wondering if the zombie can help us mythologise the lessons we learned, the growth we experienced, and the new synergestic dances with viruses we evolved, in a bid to keep talking about it and process our collective trauma. What happens after Termine, Einde, The End, as the screen goes black, the credits rolls, and the somber music playing? You realise this will need collective imagination, so you set up a writers room and sit down to start writing…
Interactive installation and workshops as part of Plotting Patterns and Portals, MU Hybrid Art, 15 December to 13 March 2024.
Photos by Boudewijn Bollman
The Orders of The Undead
What do we learn about infectious disease, mortality and modernity/coloniality from zombie mythology? Through ongoing review and analysis of key zombie movies, games, literature and other pop culture media, The Orders of the Undead highlights how ideas and behaviour that originate in colonialism continue to be propagated in our entertainment media and replicated in everyday prejudices.
The project is a result of a collaboration between research designer Nadine Botha and skin infections specialist Henry de Vries, and was the winner of the 2020 Bio Art and Design Award.
Evolutionaries
MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, 11 December 2020 to 9 May 2021
Viral Imaginaries
Viral Imaginaries is an ongoing collaborative investigation into attitudes towards viruses and apocalypse. It draws on various design research methodologies, including digital ethnography, user interviews, film and media analysis, participatory practices, social media interventions, gamification, and critical fabulation to invite thinking beyond the scripted narratives that result in default outcomes. The project is driven by a loose evolving collective including Nadine Botha, Henry de Vries, Pete Ho Chin Fung and Coltrane Mcdowell. Contact us.
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