Call for papers
There’s still time! Please submit your contribution to Cosmic Bulletin 2021 to cosmos [at] e-flux.com by May 1, 2021. You can find the complete call for papers here.
In the meantime, cosmism takes center stage at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in the form of a film program soon. Curious readers in Madrid can find event details below.
Warmly,
The Institute of the Cosmos
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia presents “Possible Futures: Cinema and Worlds to Come”
Program 1
“Cosmism: Immortality for All”
The first program in the “Possible Futures: Cinema and Worlds to Come” series centers on cosmism, the eclectic mystical-scientific school of thought that surfaced in Russia in the late 19th century and the first third of the 20th century, championing the eradication of death and fusing life with the cosmos, as an entity that flows beyond the human.
Possible Futures is curated by Chema González and organized by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia.
Reserve your ticket here.
Session 1
Friday, April 30 at 6:30pm CEST, Nouvel Building, Auditorium 400
Monday, May 3 at 6pm CEST, Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita, with live musical accompaniment by Abel Hernández (El Hijo), José Sánchez-Sanz, and Mario Quiñones for the April 30 screening
A major success in Soviet cinema and regarded as the first silent science-fiction film, Aelita also puts forward a surprising feminist reading of the Russian Revolution. With a script inspired by the homonymous novel by Cosmist writer Alexei Tolstoy and an elaborate Constructivist set design by artists Aleksandra Ekster and Isaak Rabinovich, the film narrates Martian life as an improved mirroring of activity on earth, specifically in Moscow in the years of the New Economic Policy (NEP), 1922–1928. A Soviet expedition reaches Mars and starts an uprising against the despots that subjugate Aelita, Queen of the Red Planet. The result of this insurrection sets forth a veiled criticism of the Revolution’s authoritarian drifts.
Session 2
Wednesday, May 5 at 6pm CEST, Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Thursday, May 6 at 6pm CEST, Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Monday, May 17 at 6pm CEST, Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Anton Vidokle’s Immortality for All: a Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism, with a video introduction by the artist.
What if the Soviet Revolution did not look to collectivise property but rather life? And what if the ultimate aim was not to put an end to social classes but death? This trilogy by artist Anton Vidokle sets out a speculative journey through one of the most powerful ideologies on the future: Cosmism. A heterodox Russian ideology straddling the 19th and 20th centuries that postulated immortality, not symbolically, but through the advance of science and humanity’s fusion with the cosmos. In other words, with other lives that are wider than the individual, society and the nation. Founded by philosopher Nikolai F. Fyodorov (1827–1903), Cosmism is the origin of many of the mystical beliefs adopted by art’s avant-garde movements—for instance, theosophy—and has ramifications in post-humanist and contemporary naturalist thought.
