The Pythian School of Futures

The Pythian School of Futures is an exhibition, learning program and podcast series produced by Avenir Institute. This body of work sets out to critically examine past conceptions of the future to propose plural, inclusive and participatory understandings of it. Its title refers to the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi who also served as its oracle. Also known as the Oracle of Delphi, Pythia (and the cult around her) was a powerful mechanism in ancient Greece which engineered the future for its time through delivering prophecies.

Seeking to elaborate a subjective take on the future conceptualized as avenirology, the first chapter of the Pythian School of Futures is the podcast series. Consisting of seven episodes, it will unfold by unpacking past and new works of Avenir Institute. Co-founder of the institute, Denis Maksimov will pose questions regarding various subjects that have a definitive impact on our collective future such as normality, state politics, futurology, historiography, and language.

Episode 0 will be available at www.avtoonline.org, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify soon.

Cyber-PiraMMMida

Join our pyramid scheme: Sign up for launch

1 July 2020: Launch of Cyber-PiraMMMida

August 2020: Call for Proposals for PiraMMMida Symposium announced

16 October 2020: PiraMMMida Symposium and publication of PiraMMMida: The Book

Cyber-PiraMMMida is a transdisciplinary, transmedia project devoted to ridiculing, tricking, twisting, queering, resisting – and perverting – the pyramidal spectres and structures which haunt the worlds of architecture, art, academia and the everyday. In particular, Cyber-PiraMMMida is fascinated by “fake horizontals”: pharaonic edifices of exploitation masquerading as paragons of grassrootist virtue.

PiraMMMida is named in anti-homage to MMM Bank, an infamous pyramid scheme established by convicted fraudster Sergei Mavrodi (1932-2018) in 1991 in Russia. MMM Bank spread to much of the Global South and Global East in the 2000s and 2010s, in the process defrauding thousands of vulnerable people of their livelihoods – some of whom joined the scheme perfectly knowing its fraudulent nature but still desiring to cash out before others as it collapses.

The pyramidality of socio-political structures is embedded in our collective human imaginaries, materalities and passions: it has survived a multiplicity of plagues, wars, natural disasters and other calamities over the centuries. The current COVID-19 outbreak is no exception. The plague is not a leveller.

Cyber-PiraMMMida – an online portal and a consequent virtual symposium – is constructed around three conceptual cornerstones: Power, Planet and Plague.Contributors – artists, architects, thinkers, activists, scholars and others – each try to make sense of (and often to pervert) the verticalities, horizontalities, perpendicularities and other political geometries (real and fake), which constitute the contours of our present-day pyramids in a time of pandemic, planetary meltdown and fascism resurgent.  

Pyramidal structures continue to define the spatiality of both physical and metaphysical institutions: from cities obsessed with soaring verticalities and efficiency distributions to the new cults and religions of seemingly “secularised” societies. In our financialized age, quick-buck Ponzi and pyramid schemes have replaced longer-term flat-yield types of investment; the culture of debt and borrowed futures has completely colonized the socio-political imaginary. 

While our theoreticians are busy “keeping the social flat”, fantasising of plateaus rather than highlands and indeterminate rhizomes rather than protruding roots and branches, novel forms of hierarchy and inequality continue to sprout (and antique ones to flourish), camouflaged by the ersatz horizontality of sharing economies, crypto-currencies and networked sociality. 

Meanwhile, the political economy and political geometry of the vertical and horizontal axes have been reversed. The poor once dwelled in the mountains, in garrets and in tower blocks. Today, the mountains are home to economic fora, garrets have been turned into lofts and tower blocks are demolished or left to burn to the ground. Only the celestial class of HNWIs (high net worth individuals) are permitted access to the clean(er) air high above the ground. Nature’s eternal ice towers melt into the sea, while the surging waves wash away all that is left clinging to the ground. As the seas recede, the acronymized gods who dwell in pyramids return in giant vessels (Grande Navi) to photograph themselves against the picturesque backdrop of those ruins still afloat.

Are any potent alternative political geometries possible in the context of the new-old pyramidal hierarchies of today, amidst a commodity fetishism more blinding than ever before? Can we find ways of queering, transversing, subversing and perverting the pyramids (and pharaohs) who loom among among us? Can we find ways of scaling the pyramid in order to chop off its tip? Or sliding down it, or digging through it, in order to undermine its foundations? Or finding a shortcut or a slowcut through its labyrinths, a secret portal, through which we can arrive somewhere other than the constant reproductions of an accelerated present in which we are always already late? And, most importantly, can we find a way of toppling the pyramid in such a way that it is not the wretched beings at its base who bear the brunt of the explosion, the burden of the collapse, the pounding of the waves? 

PiraMMMida (also known as Palazzo Perverso #2) is the second iteration of the PPV presence in Venice after “The Palace of Ritual” in the Signum Foundation, Palazzo Dona Brusa (co-curated by Annie Jael Kwan, Denis Maksimov, Michał Murawski, Kasia Sobucka), convened during the preview days of the 58th Venice Biennale Arte “May You Live in Interesting Times” in 2019.

Curators

Denis Maksimov
Masha Mileeva
Michał Murawski
David Roberts

Contributors-PiraMMMidalists

Marco Baravalle / David Bernstein / David Brodsky / Victor Buchli and Ethno-ISS / Keti Chukhrov / Alberto Duman / Liva Dudareva / Carla Garlaschi / Vivek Gupta + Denis Maksimov / Philippa Hetherington / Jeeva_D and Georgia Martin (8 years old) / Rita Kuleva / Agnieszka Kurant / Alena Ledeneva / Thandi Loewenson / Michał Murawski / Barbara Penner / Georgios Papadopoulos / Peg Rawes / Jane Rendell / Tabita Rezaire / Natalia Romik / Rafael Schacter / Uta Staiger / Kuba Szreder / Antoine Wagner / Peter Zusi

Partners

Supported by the Bartlett Architectural Research Fund,
UCL European Institute (Jean Monnet Centre for Excellence)
and the FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity.

Realised in partnership with S.a.L.E. Docks and the Avenir Institute.

Ancient Delphi as the Oikumene’s Centre of Futures Studies

14th London Ancient Science Conference 2020, UCL, London

The Delphic Oracle had been the site of paramount importance on Pan-Hellenic:: level and even beyond. “…scholars have pointed to Delphi as a developing ‘information centre’… priests who were plugged in to the information hub at Delphi and this able to give better-informed guesses…” (Michael Scott).
Ancient Greek and Hellenic culture:: had special relation with the concept of time as futures- focused society: chresmologoi (oracle-tellers) and manties (seers) function of indicating possible moment of kairos as personal and collective hiatus is comparable to contemporary methodologies of foresight in politics and economics. The Delphic Pythia had been receiving multiple choice questions from the inquirers and responded in coded verse that needed to be methodologically interpreted further.
Euripides referred to idea of quality in future-telling and futures-making techne saying “the best seer is the one who guesses right”. In my paper, I will look references to the oracle and the institutions around it (such as temples and rites) as the elements of future-making techniques and the attempts on scientific approach to futures studies, which re-emerged in the Western academia as discipline in the second half of 20 century.

(Source: ucl.ac.uk)