CHARISMATIC CONSULTATIONS
Parallel to the congress twelve scholars and everyday experts made available their consultation competence. Congress visitors could book a 20-minute single session on all three days. The charismatic consultation persuaded through wisdom, presence and suggestive power, refusing to deliver pragmatic advice and instructions.
ZOMBIFICATION
The consultations concerned phenomena in which death (in small portions) penetrates into individual life without occurring in such concentration to lead to final death. As we know nothing about death itself beyond fictions and symbolizations, these small deaths are the only live death experiences we can communicate about without immediately referring to conventions or the afterlife. We are only ever present at, and so witnesses to, dying and not death. The counselling session could be thus described as conversations from zombie to zombie, also and precisely because the zombie as a film icon never speaks. Lovesickness, the death of someone else, exhaustion, illness, madness, fear, overload, tiredness, unemployment, melancholy, depression etc are all forms and states expressing excessive sadness and isolation, also manifested physically in the mute figure of the zombie. These are situations in which intentionality and volition turn into a cycle of repetition and impoverishment of experience that takes on a life of its own. The zombie can be considered as belonging to a twilight zone of the representable, which like a kind of incarnated incapacity to imagine fantasies of survival and eternity attempts to exorcise precisely these. In “our” modern western life, where death and dying no longer possess a key ritualized significance, and the dead (the ancestors) are no longer permanently entreated to intervene permanently in the present, but where we are simultaneously in real-time confronted with global dying, a true obsession for reports of death, these interviews were conceived as an opportunity to entice the undead, who we are too, to speak.
CONSULTATION 1: “FINALLY AND NO END”
Christiane Voss
CONSULTATION 2: “DESIRE”
Nicolas Siepen
CONSULTATION 3: “TURN AROUND”
Ulrike Grossarth
CONSULTATION 4: “EXHAUSTION”
Schorsch Kamerun
CONSULTATION 5: “AURATIC MANIFESTATIONS”
Silvia Berger
CONSULTATION 6: “HEALING” (in English)
Vaginal Davis
CONSULTATION 7: “FEAR”
Marianne Schuller
CONSULTATION 8: “HUNGRY GHOSTS”
Monika Treut
CONSULTATION 9: “HUMAN DESIGN”
Oliver Müller
CONSULTATION 10: “LURID DEATH”
Barbara Bilabel
CONSULTATION 11: “NIGHT”
Katherina Zakravsky
CONSULTATION 12: “HEARING VOICES”
Felix Kubin
CONSULTATIONS 13-16: various speakers from the congress.