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The Zombie Apocalypse as Mindfulness Manifesto by Ricardo Bessa

The Zombie Apocalypse as Mindfulness Manifesto by Ricardo Bessa

Honey Adraque
May 19, 2015
4 Comments

To all zombie lovers, The Walking Dead fans club, etc., today's feature is for you. How would you survive a zombie apocalypse? That is what The Walking Dead American TV series teaches the people but today's design is more about on what The Zombie Apocalypse as Mindfulness Manifesto looks like. Let us give a little of our time to look at Ricardo Bessa's illustration. Enjoy!

Information about the Zombie series - it was drawn in pencil and coloured in Photoshop, for Prof. Chris Goto-Jones's essay (Leiden University). Here's the abstract from the essay:

An icon of horror, the zombie blunders with apparent mindlessness, bringing only contagion and chaos. It has lost its ego, its individuality, its reasoning self. It is a repellent vision of posthumanity. Mindfulness is a therapeutic practice rooted in the meditative traditions of Buddhism. Liberated from the stresses and anxieties of capitalist society, practitioners escape the demands of an ego driven to exhaustion by instrumental rationality. This essay explores the growing interest in mindfulness meditation and flourishing portrayals of the zombie apocalypse in contemporary societies to suggest a connection between these models of (post)selfhood.
- Ricardo Bessa

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About Ricardo Bessa

Ricardo Bessa is a small-town guy, born and raised in Portugal where he studied Art & Multimedia at the Faculty of Fine-Arts of the University of Lisbon, majoring in Animation. At the age of 21, he moved to London to do a masters in Illustration in Kingston University and where he currently lives. After graduation, he worked as an assistant for the D&AD Awards (Design & Art Direction) which are a big institution in the UK, where he learned a lot about the design and advertising industries. He has been actively pursuing a career and working as an illustrator for about 3 years, which he does full-time now. You can find more of his works on his Behance profile or website.

4 comments on “The Zombie Apocalypse as Mindfulness Manifesto by Ricardo Bessa”

  1. The link between mindlessness and mindfulness via zombies and Buddhism sounds fascinating but I'd like a bit more information. I think it's the start of a very clever project but it's a bit vague at the moment. Is there a way of explaining the link more through illustration? I'm interested that in many of your pictures the zombies seem to be communicating but I'd like to know more about why this is.

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