Citizens of the Cosmos: Films of Anton Vidokle

Please join us at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on Friday, March 1 at 1pm for a conversation between Daniel Muzyczuk, book contributor and Chief Curator of Muzeum Sztuki, Łodz, and artist Anton Vidokle in celebration of the launch of Citizens of the Cosmos (2024), co-published by Sternberg Press and Sirius Arts Centre. The book launch is held in conjunction with Stedelijk’s Fifth International Khardzhiev Conference, which will feature a screening of Vidokle’s film Immortality and Resurrection For All! (2016, 34 minutes) on March 1 at 11am.

Citizens of the Cosmos examines the artist Anton Vidokle’s films and the Cosmist philosophy underpinning them. It features essays and conversations with Vidokle by seminal contemporary theorists, curators, and artists: Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Keti Chukhrov, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Daniel Muzyczuk, Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Raqs Media Collective. This is the first book to survey Vidokle’s Cosmism-related filmic output, begun in 2014, and includes full scripts from the films.

The book’s contributors speculate on Vidokle’s Cosmist conceptions of technological immortality, resurrection of all ancestors, radical museology, and space travel, grappling with how these ideas embroil or crystallize contemporary theories, artistic and technological imaginaries: atmospheric manipulation, cryonics, biopolitics, extraplanetary prospecting, geo-engineering, genetics.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi disagrees with the Cosmist conjecture of death as a flaw in the conception of the human being. Elizabeth Povinelli digests the life-nonlife mattering of dust through relationships to and from the human and more-than-human ancestors to come. Boris Groys contemplates the gravitational forces between Cosmism and communism according to cosmic and social orders, grounded as they are in the laws of both physics and socialist politics. Keti Chukhrov considers the formation of thinking through madness, dying, and reasoning according to Cosmist philosophical and religious debates and beliefs. Raqs Media Collective and Anton Vidokle discuss different cultures of death, finitude, and rituals. Miguel Amado and Georgia Perkins examine the in-betweeness of the categories of life and death through the designs of terraforming vehicles navigating interplanetary space travel. Daniel Muzyczuk investigates Vidokle’s interests in the context of the history of the collection at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, while Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle converse about filmmaking references and methods, from voiceover narrative to editing processes.

Citizens of the Cosmos is edited by Miguel Amado, associate edited by Ben Eastham and Hallie Ayres, and designed by Atelier d’Alves.

Two more book launch events will follow, in New York and in Berlin. Details are forthcoming.