Dis Manibus: a taxonomy of ghosts from popular forms

This stunning broadside print proffers exactly what the title promises. On one side of folded panels the authors, English artist Professor Robert Williams and German sociologist Dr Hilmar Schäfer, describe the terms for a workshop they ran with young American artists at the Mildred’s Lane experimental summer school, Pennsylvania in 2013. That workshop explored the tropes, imagery and narrative structures that shape popular accounts of ghosts in a diverse range of media, with a special focus on British history. Their short essay is punctuated with an archive of extraordinary silverprint photographs that reveal ghosts in shot, be they real or not. The other side of the print unfolds into a large spider-diagram that charts the findings generated by the workshop as an extensive taxonomy.