»All ages are ages of transition; but this is an awful moment of transition.« Lord Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam A.H.H.

In 2005, about 150 local residents dressed up as zombies met up in a park located in northeastern Minneapolis in search of diversion. Every year since then, an exponentially expanding zombie horde has appeared in the Twin Cities, people from outlying suburbs no one had thought about for years. Fourteen years later, thirty-thousand zombies come crawling into the city on a single night and break Guinness World Records. Moving slowly, they stagger in the direction of what they feed on: the living; beer; things they want to buy. Every year, Google, Amazon, mega-brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev, and of course George A. Romero grant them / us (they are us!) permission to symbolically take over the streets and awaken dead city centers to “life.” Quite a few of us are disgusted by Pub Crawls and flee from Zombie Walks that take place in the inner cities of São Paulo, Paris, Minneapolis and, soon, Manila. But let’s remember what a survivor in Dawn of the Dead says to the others as they watch with horror the zombie hordes advance in the mall where they found refuge, “They are us!”

Dear D.,

How are you?
I miss you and the soothing darkness as we open our eyes to go hunting. There was a time when people’s freedom was marked by the distance between them and us at night. Now we must realize that the vampire’s age has faded and given way to the age of the zombie.
The zombie is considered an undead creature that feeds on the flesh of living humans and transforms them into its own kind. The ambivalent nature of the relationship between death and new (perverted) life, connects them to us. …

So we’re gradually turning into zombies. I view this zombification as a kind of becoming human. We are virtually transforming ourselves (back) into ourselves. We finally stand by our hunger and our FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Our externally driven hunger is an expression of our freedom. No more fear of misrepresentation! We represent ourselves and only ourselves as a consuming, melancholic mass. For me, it is a time of sadness and farewell to the myth of a fair vampirism and a modernism that has long nourished me, but also deceived and excluded many others. It is good that this old “New World,” with its monopolies of violence, is disappearing. Do you also believe, like most people, that in twenty years the world will be much worse off, but you will personally be doing much better? How much violence will we use in the future to secure our personal “happiness?” It will also be about that.

Greetings from Minneapolis. R.

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Concept & Vestimentaire: Roseline Rannoch
Vestimentaire: Philipp Rupp
Music: Felix Profos
Performers: Sabrina Diehl, Lydia Egge, Christina M. Karr, Jessie Lee-Bauder