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Performance and Civic Engagement pp 159–185Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Dead Are Coming: Political Performance Art, Activist Remembrance and Dig(ital) Protests

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Abstract

This chapter approaches the work of the Berlin-based Centre for Political Beauty [Zentrum Politische Schönheit] (CPB) with respect to the notion of ‘activist citizenship’. It considers one of the CPB’s political artworks—The Dead Are Coming [Die Toten Kommen]—which took place in June 2015, in terms of the politics of public mourning and contextualises it against a deeper genealogy of the performative use of digging as a form of protest in Berlin connected to the active remembrance of Germany’s negative twentieth-century past. In turn, the chapter argues that The Dead Are Coming not only represented an ‘act of citizenship’ but also a form of ‘activist remembrance’‚ which involved processes of mediatised performative commemoration. This emergent genre of commemoration is then introduced in more detail, before some of its digital gestural remains are mapped in order to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the artwork.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Digital Social Research Unit (DIGSUM), Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Samuel Merrill

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  1. Samuel Merrill
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Correspondence to Samuel Merrill .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of East London, London, United Kingdom

    Ananda Breed

  2. University of Winchester, Winchester, United Kingdom

    Tim Prentki

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Merrill, S. (2018). The Dead Are Coming: Political Performance Art, Activist Remembrance and Dig(ital) Protests. In: Breed, A., Prentki, T. (eds) Performance and Civic Engagement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66517-7_10

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