Orders of the Undead. You survived, what now? (2020/2023)
Nadine Botha & Henry de Vries, with Pete Fung and Coltrane McDowell

The starting point is 2020. 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, we made a supercut of the undead tropes that played out in pop culture and public health. Just days after the Orders of the Undead is installed in MU Hybrid Art House, another lockdown was called and the exhibition closed. Again we sank into a haze of not knowing the inside from the outside, which vaccine booster was to be had, and whether anything ever made sense before the pandemic?

Fast forward to 2023. 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. We start wondering if the zombie can help us mythologize 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. We realize this will need collective imagination, so we set up a writers room where we can all sit down and start writing… what happens after The End, as the screen goes black, the credits roll, and the somber music plays?

Photography: Hanneke Wetzer