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Affirmative

A large zombie functions as a bench-top in a gallery kitchen. Entering the kitchen, it was difficult to recognise the zombie as such. However, surveillance footage presented the scene as from above: the black and white monster appeared as if suspended in the process of rising from the dead. Viewers appeared as small and upside-down figures circumnavigating the zombie. Watching the TV screen in the installation, they saw themselves standing in the clutches of this giant zombie, staring at themselves.

Affirmative played with incongruent narratives of survival and improvement. The zombie provided a working space, useful for cooking and eating as well as engaging with artistic and existential enquiry. The large curvaceous zombie backside was an excellent food preparation area, and it was natural for people to place their glass down on its skull as they reached into the fridge for a drink. The waste-bin was soon stored under the zombie’s leg, and occasionally a tea-towel folded to dry over its foot beside the sink. Yet of course zombies are dangerous as unintelligent, brain-eating, infectious monsters that are notoriously difficult to kill. In typical zombie movies, a small group of people barricade them-selves in a domestic space against the undead invasion. Conversely, this zombie was in the kitchen first, and was contrived of the very domestic materials with which one might build such barricades. The suspense was absurd, posing circuitous loops of food, fiction and thinking.