Living Dead
In a new performance film Jose Funnell asks what does the collective soul of humanity sing in its last breath?
Living Dead is a series of lamentations, an embodied attempt to grieve the present state of humanity and the violent dehumanisation running from colonial capitalism to today.
Drawing on the figure of the zombie, rooted in Haitian Voudou and the horrors of slavery and later repurposed as a metaphor for consumption and collapse, the work asks how contemporary life sustains itself through manufactured addiction, manipulated desire, and the alternate realities that enable dissociation. The states required to survive a culture of relentless extraction while ignoring its human costs.
“What does the collective soul of humanity sing in its last breath? How might we reanimate our bodies and communities in resistance?”
This research that inform the work holds the uneasy truth that we are continuations of our ancestors, dying while living — already the living dead
This work was commissioned by Somerset House Studios and developed over a one-week period as part of Grounding Practice: Performance in Practice, December 2025.
