Training for the Future: WE DEMAND A MILLION MORE YEARS

From June 28 to 30, 2022, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo will host Training for the Future: WE DEMAND A MILLION MORE YEARS, the new edition of the project conceived by Jonas Staal, curated and co-programmed by Florian Malzacher. In a time of increasing global crises in politics, economy and ecology, dystopia has become the new norm. Training for the Future is a utopian training camp where audiences are turned into trainees to pre-enact alternative scenarios and reclaim the means of production of the future. This project launches the final season of VERSO, the artistic and educational programme run by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo with the Department of Youth Policies of the Piedmont Region. 

This edition of Training for the Future puts its focus on chronopolitics: the politics of time in a moment we are out of time. The title WE DEMAND A MILLION MORE YEARS responds directly to our increasingly limited ideas on timescales and possible futurities. The time arch of most politicians goes no further than “the children of my children” (merely two generations), while the fossil fuels that are burned to accelerate movement in the present and make the future unlivable, represent themselves millions of years of earth inheritance. Training for the Future rejects the extractive linear paradigm of time that dominates our present, and makes relentless claims on deep futures: for ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years, a million more years of living worlds for all. 

During the three intensive days, artists, philosophers, activists as well as non-human presences lead trainings on time travel, deep listening, radical slowness, the subconscious present, plant-based time, and planetary politics. Across these collective exercises, a different chronopolitics—a different politics of time—is made manifest. 

The focus on time also informs the design of the installation where the training programme takes place. Jonas Staal together with architect Paul Kuipers conceived an installation whose constructive elements carry different temporal marks, all interconnected: ammonite fossils, a family of octopus and squid that went extinct in the 5th mass extinction 66 million years ago; defunct synthetic tires, that stand for an industry and an economic boom—the so-called “Italian miracle”—that is a recent archeology of the larger Turin region; and finally hardened oil, the fossil inheritance whose combustion fuels the destruction of common futures. Assembled in sculptural configurations and functional training support systems, these elements together give shape to a chronopolitical arena, in which the living worlds stored in fossils are conceived not only as witnesses, but as trainers in their own right: no one can teach you what a million more years is, but a million years itself.  

The installation remains visible beyond the time of the camp, through September 2022, operating as an ongoing training environment, both for autonomous training experiences and for further opportunities for collective and structured events within the VERSO programme and in relation to the local context of the Turin region. 

Trainings by Diana Anselmo & Giuseppe Comuniello (Al.Di.Qua.), Viviana Druga (Tarot de Berlin), Kite & Robbie Wing, Charl Landvreugd, Lorenzo Marsili, MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr), Egle Oddo, Sista Oloruntoyin (ARRiVATi). 

Training for the Future is a project by Jonas Staal, curated and co-programmed by Florian Malzacher. The 2022 edition is co-conceived by Irene Calderoni and Bernardo Follini. 

Training for the Future: WE DEMAND A MILLION MORE YEARS is commissioned by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in the context of VERSO, a programme developed with Piedmont Region and the National Youth Policies Department. Training for the Future is made possible, in part, by the Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam; Goethe-Institut Turin. Special support by Direzione Rifiuti, Bonifiche e Sicurezza Siti Produttivi della Città Metropolitana di Torino; Amiat Gruppo Iren; Turin Carta. 

Training dates: June 28–30, 2022 
Exhibition dates: July 2–October 2, 2022 

Full programme and registration (link) 

About VERSO 
VERSO is an artistic and educational programme articulated through exhibitions, workshops, public programmes and research groups. VERSO is conceived as a platform to address the autonomy and fulfilment of the younger generations and their participation in social and political life. The course is divided into thematic chapters focusing the following areas of research: language as a device for producing opinion and subjectivity, the assembly as a place for democratic confrontation, political reasoning as an arena for questioning reality, technology as a tool for constructing the self, and urban space as a scenario for emancipation and the conquest of rights.