The Undead

“It is not true that vampires have no reflection in the mirror. They do, but it takes a long time for it to appear.” This is the thought by the Lebanese writer, thinker and film artist Jalal Toufic that spurs The Undead, a collaboration between Katarina Stegnar, a member of the Mladinsko ensemble, and one of the most influential researchers of the relationship between the document, history and fiction, Walid Raad. Toufic’s book on vampires is not a study of a film monster, but a philosophical meditation on presence and absence, on images that survive their mediums, and on the way in which the dead return among the living. For Raad, a vampire is a metaphor revealing the precarity of time, identity and memory. The production will develop from the question of how these ideas can remain on stage. What does it mean to embody a thought? How to stage something that eschews representation? And what happens when a performer becomes a meeting place for her own biography, borrowed stories and other people’s memories?

The Undead are created at the intersection of theatre, performance art, lecture and documentary fiction. In a dialogue between Katarina Stegnar’s body and Walid Raad’s conceptual universe, the questions of truth, authorship and trust will open. The production will not seek clear answers, but rather create a space in which uncertainty becomes productive, and fiction becomes a way to reveal what documents cannot capture. In times when artificial intelligence produces images, stories and identities that are increasingly difficult to tell apart from “the real ones”, The Undead will pose the question that is older than technology: How do we recognise that which haunts us? And isn’t art perhaps that delayed reflection that allows us to see it?