Future Past Perfect. Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism

A project presentation, film screening, and open discussion with Anton Vidokle, the US artist and filmmaker.

During the past ten years, the artist Anton Vidokle has been researching, translating, and disseminating ideas of Biocosmism-Immortalism, a partially forgotten set of futurist theories developed in the final decades of the Russian Empire and the first decade following the Communist Revolution. Its utopian tenets – combining Western Enlightenment with Eastern philosophy, religious and mystical traditions with Marxism – inspired many key Soviet thinkers until they fell victim to Stalinist repression. In the film trilogy Immortality for All, Vidokle probes cosmism’s influence on the twentieth century and suggests its relevance to the present day. In Part One, he returns to the foundations of cosmist thought (This Is Cosmos, 2014). Part Two explores the links between cosmism and politics (The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, 2015) and Part Three restages the museum as a site of resurrection, a central cosmist idea (Immortality and Resurrection for All!, 2017). In his most recent films, Vidokle examines the Biocosmist Manifesto by the Ukrainian anarchist and poet Alexander Svyatogor (Agienko) and the Ukrainian-Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky's thoughts on autotrophia (self-feeding).

Moderator: Tihomir Topuzovski, Assistant Professor at The Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje (ISSHS), and editor-in-chief of the journal The Large Glass.

Bio:
Anton Vidokle was born in 1965 in Moscow. In 1979, he started studying painting at the studio of the Soviet artist Konstantin Karamyan. In 1981, with his parents, he immigrated to the United States and continued his studies at the School of Visual Art in New York. He first encountered the philosophy of Russian cosmism in 2012 in conversations with Boris Groys and Ilya Kabakov. Later, Vidokle traveled to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other regions of the former USSR to research the traces left by the cosmist scientists, thinkers and artists. To date, Vidokle has completed seven short films based on the writings by such cosmist authors as Nikolai Fedorov, Vassily Chekhrygin, Vladimir Vernadsky, Aleksandr Svyatogor and Valerian Muraviov. Vidokle initiated the English translation and publication of historical texts as well as contemporary writing on this topic for e-flux journal. Jointly with Arseny Zhilyaev, Vidokle started the Institute of the Cosmos, an online publication and an open archive of research on this subject. Vidokle’s work has been presented in international exhibitions such as documenta 12, and Venice Biennial 50 and 56. The films included in the exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery have been presented at the Berlinale, Locarno Film Festival, Ural Industrial Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Reina Sofia, Garage Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and many other art centers.

The event is a part of the program of the international conference "Urban Sustainability and Cultural Landscapes in Europe in Times of Crises: political plastic, recycling of the (post)-Soviet pasts, and utilization of heritage." It will begin at 17:00 at the CBEES kitchen (M7) with an informal reception. The project presentation will start at 18:00 at Svarta Lådan (MB 313).