In May 2011, a three day congress was held in Hamburg, titled THE UNDEAD – LIFE SCIENCES & PULP FICTION. The congress was the location of an encounter between more the 80 persons and various languages which currently define what is still/already alive and what is still/already dead. The congress was played out in the mise-en-scène of a film set – hospital, laboratory, cemetery, cinema –, a tribute to the cinematic figure of the zombie, who appeared on screen without any significant antecedent in literature or art history. At these interfaces the congress should have been gathered narratives, signs, images and ciphers for an archive of the undead.
60 hours of recorded material, presentations, lectures, conversations from the project The Undead. Life Science & Pulp Fiction, Hamburg 2010
Protagonists
Philosopher Petra Gehring on deregulated death, physician Andreas Zieger on the death politics of contemporary medical science, literary studies theorists Joseph Vogl und Philipp Ekardt on undead figures in the money sphere, psychologist und nurse Roberto Rotondo on braindead people from the nurse’s perspective, film theorist Drehli Robnik on the asthetic of zombie movies, ethnologist Michi Knecht on the social life of deep-frozen embryos, author Mark Ravenhill on the fatal narration of people living with the HI virus, lawyer Oliver Tolmein on patients rights and protective functions of laws, biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey bioethicist Andy Miah on the promis and horro of eternal life.
Credits
Concept: Philipp Hochleichter, Hannah Hurtzig, Florian Stirnemann
A project by: German Federal Cultural Foundation
In co-ooperation with Kampnagel Hamburg and Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Tour Stations:
Federal Cultural Foundation, Halle an der Saale, April 2014.
Institute for Medicine and History of Science at the University of Lübeck as part of the 13th Lübeck Museum Night, September 2013.
Kampnagel Hamburg as part of “Old School – learning from the old,” May 2013
University of Witten/Herdecke as part of the exhibition “The Culture of the Experience of Death,” January 2013
The Brno House of Arts, Czech Republic, as part of the exhibition “What about the Ghosts in Town?”, November 2012
German Hygiene Museum Dresden, October 2012
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, as part of the Salon Sophie Charlotte 2012 “Knowledge is Art – Art is Knowledge,” January 2012