Skull-zombies sticking around
(Art project, rooted in street art, unfolded between 2016 and 2020)
“The price of liberation is eternal vigilance—not against external oppressors, but against the zombies we might become.”
Conceptual Framework
The Skull Zombie project reflects on the discomfort of contemporary society and the conformity imposed on individuals by the cohesion of technology and power. Today, many people act like zombies—neither fully alive nor truly dead, a logical contradiction and a natural aberration.
The human skull is naturally round, spherical. Yet, the zombie skulls in this project are molded into tight, boxed, cube-like forms, bandaged like the bound feet of a chanzú lotus. This transformation is almost imperceptible to the majority, perhaps desensitized by endless spectacles and sterile distractions. The constriction prevents excessive growth, ostensibly for the benefit of societal cohesion, but it is riddled with contradictions that go unnoticed or unaddressed. Art, in this context, speaks to what has been left unsaid. The Skull Zombies are a critique of life, expansion, constriction, and conformity. A quick example? Take modern education. As Pink Floyd famously sang: "We don’t need no thought control... Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!"
From primary school to advanced university studies, an invisible, diffuse force perpetuates the status quo of contemporary society. Through subtle, non-illegal means of manipulation, many educators—self-deluded and serving the "ministry of education"—act more like parasites than life instructors. The ancient concept of paideia (holistic education) has long been forgotten.
Historically, power has often resorted to extreme measures to suppress ideas that challenge the established order. From Socrates to Giordano Bruno, and countless others, this pattern persists even today. The most paradigmatic example is Jesus, whose message of love and harmony has been reduced to the iconic image of the cross—a symbol of punishment, fear, and pain, rather than joy or happiness. And a warning to those who dare confront established power. This lead us to ask if there is a beauty-pain binomial at play here?
The beauty of new ideas—not material things—lies in virtue, correct thoughts, and unbiased freedom. Goodness is beautiful. But for who? Primarily for the young, who are often ignorant and immature, yet necessary for change. On the other hand, pain is ugly. Old ideas, like aging bodies, grow unattractive over time. Desperate to survive, these outdated ideas resort to force, resisting death as if it were an end rather than a transition.
Excessive desire and greed breed a conservative attachment to the status quo, rejecting change as a necessity. This clinging to the past is like an aging actor denying their years through endless cosmetic procedures—a psychological imbalance rather than a sign of a healthy, mature mind.
As you can see, skull-zombie stickers have a quite deep conceptual explanation, beyond stickerbombing.
Visual Design and Archetypes
The visual designs of the Skull Zombies adapt opposing archetypes into antagonistic dichotomies, creating a metaphysics of human relationships through contemporary psychological profiles:
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The Existential Conscious
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The Candid Goodist
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The Self-Pleasing Ignorant
Versus
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The Unrecognized Addict
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The Indolent Hedonist
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The Integrated Psychopath
Medium and Dissemination
The medium chosen for this project was countercultural. When it began in 2016, street stickers were a lesser-known facet of street art, often seen as a minimal expression. For Skull Zombie, the variety of designs was intentional—rather than bombarding the streets with a single image, the goal was to provoke reflection through the message conveyed by each sticker.
Today, the project feels somewhat isolated or misunderstood. While stickers are a countercultural medium, they rarely carry messages of artistic depth. The Skull Zombie designs needed to reflect this depth visually, hence their cubic, three-dimensional forms. These boxed, protruding shapes symbolize the weight of the issues they address. In more advanced designs, shadows were added to create the illusion of floating, further emphasizing their detachment from superficiality.
The designs were more than sufficient to adapt to the paste-up medium, allowing for more elaborate creations than basic stickers. This approach became a recognizable element of the artist’s style, marking a turning point in their broader body of work.
LPlease, let me delve into the philosophical depths of the Skull Zombie project, unraveling its layers of meaning and situating its critique within a broader existential, historical, and sociopolitical framework. We will interrogate the concepts of conformity, power, education, beauty-pain dualities, and the role of art as resistance. Prepare for a rigorous exploration.
1. The Zombification of Society: A Metaphysics of Conformity
The Skull Zombie project’s central metaphor—humanity as “zombies”—is a philosophical indictment of modernity’s alienation. These zombies are neither alive nor dead, existing in a liminal state that mirrors Heidegger’s “inauthentic existence”: beings who have surrendered their Dasein (being-there) to the das Man (the “They”), the anonymous crowd that dictates norms. The boxed skulls symbolize the violence of form imposed by societal structures. Just as the chanzú lotus feet were bound to conform to aesthetic ideals, modern individuals are constricted by invisible systems—capitalism, technocracy, ideological apparatuses—that mold minds into standardized shapes. This is not mere oppression but a metaphysical mutilation, where the soul’s natural “spherical” potential (recalling Plato’s Symposium, where Aristophanes describes primordial humans as spherical beings) is compressed into cubes, reducing complexity to utility.
Key Philosophers: Heidegger (inauthenticity), Foucault (disciplinary societies), Marcuse (one-dimensional man).
2. Education as a Mechanism of Control: The Death of Paideia
The critique of modern education is a direct confrontation with what Nietzsche called the “ascetic ideal”—systems that tame creativity under the guise of order. Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” is not mere protest but an anthem against what Ivan Illich termed the “institutionalization of values.” The “ministry of education” operates as a biopolitical machine (Foucault), producing docile subjects who mistake compliance for enlightenment. Contrast this with paideia, the ancient Greek ideal of holistic education that sought to cultivate arete (virtue/excellence) through dialectic and self-actualization. Today’s educators, as “parasites,” perpetuate what Paulo Freire called the “banking model” of education, depositing facts into passive minds rather than igniting critical consciousness. The zombie skulls, bandaged and constrained, embody this epistemic violence—the stifling of curiosity, the foreclosure of wonder.
Key Philosophers: Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals), Arendt (crisis in education).
3. Power and the Suppression of Dissent: A Historical Dialectic
From Socrates to Giordano Bruno to modern dissidents, power has always sought to neutralize threats to its hegemony. Socrates’ execution for “corrupting the youth” reveals a primal fear: ideas that challenge the nomos (custom/law) destabilize the polis. Bruno’s burning epitomizes the terror of the infinite—a cosmological rebellion against anthropocentric dogma. Jesus’ cross, once a symbol of radical love, was co-opted into a tool of imperial Christianity (Nietzsche’s The Antichrist), transmuting liberation theology into a cult of suffering. This reflects Walter Benjamin’s insight: “Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.” The beauty-pain binomial is thus a dialectic: new ideas (beauty) clash with entrenched systems (pain), and the collision births progress—or martyrdom.
Key Philosophers: Benjamin (“On the Concept of History”), Foucault (Discipline and Punish), Žižek (violence of ideology).
4. Beauty vs. Pain: The Aesthetics of Resistance
The project posits beauty in “virtue, correct thoughts, and unbiased freedom”—a Platonic ideal. But Plato’s Forms are static, whereas the Skull Zombie’s beauty is dynamic, rooted in Heraclitean flux. Pain, conversely, is the ugliness of stagnation. Old ideas, like aging bodies, cling to life through force, evoking Freud’s death drive: the compulsion to repeat the familiar, even if it brings suffering. The “cosmetic procedures” of decaying ideologies mirror Baudrillard’s hyperreality, where simulation replaces substance. Yet true beauty, as Kierkegaard argued, lies in the “leap of faith”—the courage to embrace the unknown, even if it risks pain. The young, as “ignorant and immature,” embody this Kierkegaardian knight of faith, willing to doubt (Descartes) and rebel (Camus) against the absurd.
Key Philosophers: Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), Camus (The Rebel), Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation).
5. The Conservatism of Desire: Greed as Existential Arrest
The project’s critique of “excessive desire and greed” aligns with Buddhist and Stoic condemnations of tanha (craving) and pleonexia (avarice). But it also echoes Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s “commodity fetishism,” where human relations are reduced to transactional logic. The “aging actor” denying decay through cosmetics is a metaphor for what Byung-Chul Han calls the “burnout society”—a culture of self-optimization that masks existential emptiness. Conservatism, here, is not political but ontological: a refusal to accept Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode (being-toward-death), the inevitability of change and finitude. To resist this, the Skull Zombie project invokes Adorno’s imperative: “Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.” Art must disrupt, not decorate.
Key Philosophers: Marx (Capital), Han (The Burnout Society), Adorno (Aesthetic Theory).
6. Art as Subversion: The Skull Zombie’s Existential Rebellion
The stickers are not mere vandalism but a guerrilla ontology—a refusal to accept the given world. Stickerbombing, as an act of détournement (Situationist tactic), hijacks public space to question ownership and control. The Skull Zombies, with their constricted skulls, are akin to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, transformed into a bug to expose familial and societal alienation. Yet unlike Kafka’s tragedy, the project offers a pathos of resistance: by making the invisible constraints visible, it invites viewers to recognize their own “boxed” minds. This is art as parrhesia (Foucault’s fearless speech), a truth-telling that risks backlash but demands courage.
Key Philosophers: Debord (Society of the Spectacle), Kafka (The Metamorphosis), Foucault (The Courage of Truth).
Conclusion: The Call to Unbind the Skull
The Skull Zombie project is a manifesto for existential and societal unbinding. It demands that we:
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Shatter the Cubes: Reject the violence of form; reclaim the “spherical” self (Heraclitus: “The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts”).
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Resurrect Paideia: Replace transactional education with Socratic dialogue, where questions matter more than answers.
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Embrace the Beauty-Pain Dialectic: Recognize that new ideas will always threaten old orders—and that this friction is the engine of progress.
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Art as Insurrection: Deploy creativity not as decoration but as a wrecking ball against ideological prisons.
In the end, the Skull Zombies ask: Will we remain bandaged, or dare to let our minds expand—even if it ruptures the world as we know it? This is the project’s ultimate provocation: to think dangerously.
by Papaboule
Skull-zombies all around
This is an art project based on street arts that took place over the years 2016 to 2020.
Conceptual Framework
The Skull Zombie project reflects on the discomfort of contemporary society and the conformity imposed on individuals by the cohesion of technology and power. Today, many people act like zombies—neither fully alive nor truly dead, a logical contradiction and a natural aberration.
The human skull is naturally round, spherical. Yet, the zombie skulls in this project are molded into tight, boxed, cube-like forms, bandaged like the bound feet of a chanzú lotus. This transformation is almost imperceptible to the majority, perhaps desensitized by endless spectacles and sterile distractions. The constriction prevents excessive growth, ostensibly for the benefit of societal cohesion, but it is riddled with contradictions that go unnoticed or unaddressed. Art, in this context, speaks to what has been left unsaid. The Skull Zombies are a critique of life, expansion, constriction, and conformity.
A quick example? Take modern education. As Pink Floyd famously sang: "We don’t need no thought control... Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!"
From primary school to advanced university studies, an invisible, diffuse force perpetuates the status quo of contemporary society. Through subtle, non-illegal means of manipulation, many educators—self-deluded and serving the "ministry of education"—act more like parasites than life instructors. The ancient concept of paideia (holistic education) has long been forgotten.
Historically, power has often resorted to extreme measures to suppress ideas that challenge the established order. From Socrates to Giordano Bruno, and countless others, this pattern persists even today. The most paradigmatic example is Jesus, whose message of love and harmony has been reduced to the iconic image of the cross—a symbol of punishment, fear, and pain, rather than joy or happiness. This is a hypocritical warning to those who dare confront established power.
Is there a beauty-pain binomial at play here?
The beauty of new ideas—not material things—lies in virtue, correct thoughts, and unbiased freedom. Goodness is beautiful. But for whom? Primarily for the young, who are often ignorant and immature, yet necessary for change. On the other hand, pain is ugly. Old ideas, like aging bodies, grow unattractive over time. Desperate to survive, these outdated ideas resort to force, resisting death as if it were an end rather than a transition.
Excessive desire and greed breed a conservative attachment to the status quo, rejecting change as a necessity. This clinging to the past is like an aging actor denying their years through endless cosmetic procedures—a psychological imbalance rather than a sign of a healthy, mature mind.
And that concludes the conceptual explanation.
For the visual of the different skullzombie designs, opposing archetypes where adapted as antagonistic dichotomies, conforming a metaphysic of human relationships thanks to a particular number of contemporary psychologic profiles:
_the existential conscious
_the candid goodist
_the self-pleasant ignorant
V.S.
_the unrecognized addict
_the indolent hedonist
_the integrated psychopath
The medium chosen to disseminate the concept was countercultural. When the project began, back in 2016, little known was the world of street stickers which always accompanied the world of street art in one of its minimal expressions. In the case of skullzombie, the number of designs was very varied from the beginning because rather than wanting to plague or bombard with a single design, it wanted to reflect on the message presented by the skull zombie stickers. Today I see this project as isolated or poorly understood because the medium of stickers did not contemplate, despite being a countercultural medium, messages in the style of artistic reflections. A message with a certain depth needed a design with a certain volume, hence the cubic three-dimensionality of the designs, squared, boxed, that protrude from the surfaces, since it was not a superficial matter that the designs evoke. In more advanced designs, shadows cast by the stickers were represented, as if floating on the surface.
However, the design was more than enough, as it was easy for him to adopt the paste-up medium to make more elaborate designs than the basic stickers. This was an element that the artist used as a recognizable element that began to mark a style in his general work. (Cf alter ego)
by Papaboule
