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.

THE TRIAL OF ZEUS

performed in the Auditorium at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum,
Copenhagen,
August 2019

Actors:
Prosecution (Avenir Institute),
Defence (Michael Haldrup) &
the Jury (the audience)

Prosecution:

The distinguished Members of the Jury, it is my utmost responsibility to bring before the critical eyes of justice the case atrocious crimes of Zeus, the father to the many from the last known generation of the gods. In the following statements, I will outline some significant episodes from the long list of crimes that he committed over the millennia of domination. It is perhaps impossible to count all of them: I will pay attention to the instances that are documented with the evidence.

I’ll start with the case of abduction, rape and further appropriation of Europa, the Phoenician/Lebanese maiden.

Dear Jury, I stand here before you to make the case against what may well be one of the gravest crimes committed against our common imaginary. Before I proceed, let me take an oath of truthfulness in the eyes of Themis, her great daughter Dike, the goddess of justice, and unforgivable punishing Furies. Shall I overstep the boundaries of truth, let them condemn me to everlasting misery.

Defence:

Dear Members of the Jury! This is a pivotal day for us all.

The accusations brought in here by the reckless servant of Athena and Dionysus are grave and the consequence of your decision can’t be overestimated. For thousands of years we have successfully relied upon our father, in the name of Zeus, for protection, guidance and inspiration in many successes our civilisations enjoyed. We have conquered the land, the sea, the skies and in the last century make our breakthrough towards the conquest of the cosmos. I beg you to remember: none of it would be possible without the norms he provided to us. Thanks to his norms we achieved the impossible.

Dismissal and condemnation are easy but gratitude and respect require the capacity for forgiveness and compassion, for the understanding of the mistakes - and our dear father endured many sacrifices for our sake.  

I also take an oath of truthfulness under the watchful eyes of Themis, Dike and the Furies.

Prosecution:

Allow me to build the case before you for Europa, a fair maiden from Phoenicia, the land that nowadays is known as Lebanon. The accused disguised himself as a bull from the flock of Europa’s father and using the maiden’s trust to the animals led her to climb his back. He then hastily run towards the bay with the frightened and shocked Europa on his back and commenced his swimming route towards the island of Crete. He put on her neck the shackle, marking his owner-ship of the captive, and repeatedly raped her.

Defence:

I protest! Zeus offered her a beautiful necklace, which signified his admiration and love for Europa.

Prosecution:

Shackles often come in a form of precious gifts, and one has a little choice from taking it differently when deprived of all they know and imprisoned in the context of the full dependency.

Further, the accused installed next to Europa the creature called Talos, which was also referred to in further writing about this event as ‘a gift’. This ‘robot’ was circling the island of Crete effectively turning it into Europa’s prison. He obstructed the attempts of Europa’s relatives from the larger Middle East to approach the island, as well as prevent her from having any thoughts about possible escape. The accused also chained the maiden to Laelaps, the dog that had never failed to catch something that it was hunting, and for the guards, he left javelin, the spear that had never missed its target. The abducted Europa spent numerous years in captivity.

Dear Members of the Jury, you are sitting on the top of the aestheticised evidence of this event covered with the black cloth - the mosaic depicting the event.

This episode brought about immeasurable consequences inflicted on what is to become Europe-an imaginary. Just as the maiden over the years spent in prison, the whole continent found itself trapped in the island mentality, subsequently forgetting its cosmopolitan, trans-geographical roots.  

Defence:

The distinguished jury, allow me to plead the case of defence. First of all, Europa, although she had been indeed initially abducted by the father against her immediate will, embraced Zeus later in love and given him beautiful children that later created the concert of the European nations that we know today.

Prosecution:

There is a clear case of “the Stockholm syndrome” in here - the maiden had no choice beyond submission or death.

Defence:

Allow me to continue, please. The father Zeus cared for the maiden’s well-being and made sure she wouldn’t need to be burdened by the worries and uncertainties in the future. He set her up for a great role in the history of humanity. All I want to say, dear members of the jury, is that from what is presented here as crime a great love story emerged that led our continent to creation of the first omnipowerful imaginary of civilisation, that will go on to captivate the peoples of other continents and cultures as soon as they got a chance to experience it, which is true up to this very day.

Prosecution:

The imaginary you are talking about is that of patriarchy and election of what is the best for the woman by the omnipowerful and always ready to ‘mansplan’ usurper, which effectively decapitated any alternative to its oppression. But allow me to continue, as the abduction of the maiden from Phoenicia is just opening the list of the crimes committed by the accused.

Secondly, I want to bring your attention to our great mother - Gaia/Earth, the primordial deity of life that gave us ecology and nature which we depend on for millions of years together with other living things. The erasure from the memory of the true nature of the Omphalos, the navel of Gaia, is another crime the accused strategically committed in his quest of erasure of the potentiality and alternative futures of leadership, effectively usurping the power by setting up ‘there is no alternative’ context.

The famous navel of Gaia had been the place of connection to mother Earth for thousands of years before the accused and his men-followers descended in sacred Delphi with the plan to erase this story from the annals and re-appropriate its history and function in the world. The accused fabricated the works of so-called ‘history’, written by those loyal to his plan, in which navel had been re-appropriated as the stone signifying his domination over the world, at which supposedly the meeting of Zeus’s two eagles which he sent to identify the center of the world (what less!) had happened. This atrocity towards the memory of the great mother created a shameless rupture that had a very particular goal - to write off the non-patriarchal story of power from the face of the world into the oblivion.

Defence:

Dear Members of the Jury, allow me to step in here again against the vicious attack on our glorious father. First of all, the very event of the member of our community being able to criticize our great father here how shows his enormous mercy towards those disrespecting him.

Prosecution:

That shows the progress in our critical thinking, not someone’s divine mercy.

Defence:

Please, I didn’t interrupt. Secondly, dear members of the Jury, the re-writing of the story of the world, especially in its mythical roots, is the event that had been happening since the dawn of times and will continue to happen. That is our nature: the conquest of imaginary is an important step in a world-making of any kind. I don’t think that Prosecution is honestly that naive to ignore the simple truth of how things meant to work in nature.

Our great father performed the power-flip in renaming the navel and appropriating it to the story in order to establish the pathway towards the new, more powerful imaginary for all of us. Without having an idea about the center of the world, as our father established it, how could we move towards discovery of the new continents, new lands, new horizons that allowed us to explore the potentiality and richness of our characters, our capacities, enrich ourselves and our perspectives and share our achievements with the world?

We are indebted to our father for showing us the way of beautiful re-appropriation for the sake of the common good of all humanity, driving us towards progress from the central point that he has identified for us. We’ve learned from this gesture what does it mean to make the world. Without that, I claim, we would not be standing here now and be able to critically analyse him, as the world-builders ourselves.

Prosecution:

Laughable. It is as to say that without a constant whipping one can not have an idea of freedom, without regular rape one can not have an idea of love.

I urge you, the distinguished members of the Jury, not to fall into the trap of talks about destiny, fate and the only possible way of how things could have developed. There are infinite worlds that are possible for us - from the cruelest and destructive to the kindest and heavenly.

Let me carry on to the next crime of the accused, against the true-born right of his two children to challenge the everlasting sovereignty of the usurper. I refer to unconquerable, wide-eyed Athena and life-loving, normality-trembling Dionysus. Let me start with the famous daughter of the tyrant, whose mother was mercilessly murdered by him.

Athena had been born from the head of Zeus, as we know. But that happened as the accused consumed the mother of Athena, the great Titaness of cunning and wisdom - Metis. He later had presented this act of violence as ‘unification’ or sort of ‘a merger’. Imagine, dear Jury, a cannibal who is presenting the consumption of their victim as an agreed act of ‘reunification’. After this outrageous act, the accused gave birth to Athena from his head following the splitting headache which is well-documented by Hesiod. But what is also important here, dear Jury is the motivation of the accused - what qualifies this act as pre-mediated, strategic murder.

Zeus received the prophecy that the child of Metis would become the new lord (or the mistress) of heaven, challenging the definition of justice and power-sharing in the Olympus. In order to prevent that future from happening, the accused was ready to kill both the mother and the child - as he swallowed Metis while she was pregnant with Athena, aiming to kill both the mother and the child. This act was the intention of the accused to cancel our possible futures and institute his domination as eternal and everlasting.

Zeus didn’t anticipate that neither mother nor child she had in her womb to survive. However, Athena marched out of his head in full armor, with a roar trembling the earth and skies. Being terrified that his scheme didn’t work, the accused immediately named her his favorite daughter. The intention of the accused was not fatherly care but a cancellation of the potential of the child whom he couldn’t otherwise immediately defeat.

Defence:

Allow me to respond here - and I simply say that the narrative, presented by the prosecution here, is purely speculative and can’t be backed by any material evidence. Why, I would ask, the supposedly deprived from power Athena was entrusted by her heavenly father with the ability to hold his utmost sacred weapons - thunderbolts - if he didn’t love her unconditionally and believe in their sacred unity? Why did she never opposed her father’s judgment and raised the issue of her mother if the unification of Zeus and Metis had been seen by her as an injustice?

Prosecution:

Entrusting her weaponry was a strategic move of the accused who is well aware that Athena is the promised child capable of challenging his tyranny. This act was a desperate attempt to create the bond of trust and pressurise Athena, a goddess of fairness, not to rebel against him after such deep and profound trust was demonstrated to her. But allow me to continue.

Dionysus’ treatment is another disgrace of the accused. Since he, the queerest being on Olympus to be, was conceived, the principal wife of the accused, Hera, waged a number of attempts of his life. Being reportedly aware of all the attempts to murder him (at least one of which was successful), Zeus covered up his wife’s actions and had never initiated her prosecution. After two cases of murder, first in the unborn from when Hera tricked the mother of Dionysus, Semele, to inflict suicidal action, and in infancy, when she sent the Titans to first kill and then consume the flesh of the child, Hera wasn’t called out. Later on, after Dionysus was resurrected, he was subjected to a memory loss through poisoning by her design.

In here, Zeus is complicit in passive collaboration via inaction with the criminal.

Defence:

Dear Jury, it is perfectly known that Zeus had nurtured and provided utmost care for the child Dionysus on both occasions of his wife’s rage. And her rage was justified. Semele, the mother of the child in question, seduced the father with her female charms and used the kind-heartedness of our father in order to pour scorn on the great institutions of the nuclear family and sacred marriage which was epitomised by the union of Zeus and Hera.

The child Semele has produced was assessed as a dangerous deviation from the norm which has allowed us to build the civilisation. Allow me to remind you, dear Jury, that without the de-fence of the sanctity of this marriage we wouldn’t be sitting in this very room thinking about coming back later to our loving spouses and children. Without the protection of that very union, the institution of the family wouldn’t have been established and we would have lived in the chaos and moral disgrace. Therefore actions of our father were directed by the protection of the overall good, while his outstanding mercy was extended to those posing the danger to it. By saving eventually both the mother and the child while not jeopardising the institution of a family our father achieved seemingly impossible balance and harmony. A truly ingenious compromise!

Semele was made immortal and brought up to the heavens and Dionysus was saved only thanks to our great father’s wisdom, achieving two contradictory things: preservation of the divine order and protection of the lives of those who were disrupting it.

Prosecution:

The claims of Defence are tremendously paternalistic, just in line with the protection of the patriarchy of Zeus at any cost. It doesn’t have anything to do with justice: but solemnly presents the justification of the current state of things in order to prevent changes at any cost.

But let me carry on, for I am to bring still another crime of the accused.

I accuse Zeus of the genocide.

Defence:

Outrageous! Choose your words wisely!

Prosecution:

Truth is hard to face certainly.

Zeus staged the conflict between Achaeans and Amazons in order to make sure that female leadership and power in military and governance exercised differently would never have the ground for opposing the male, which was designed by him to become a default. On numerous occasions, Zeus designed the contexts in which Greeks commenced the attack on Amazons and motivated his male children for various raping excursions - to wage the wars against the state of Amazons, the female-ruled civilisation. The combination of the actions and narratives, produced under the control of Zeus, were made sure to cancel out Amazons from the memory and make their story into myth. I would say, dear Jury, that this is the genocide of the unimaginable proportions that can be compared with the Nazi’s attempt to wipe out the Jews from the face of Earth and historical annals.

Zeus, the architect of the heteronormative male and masculine domination, progressed very effectively in the overall task of the annihilation of the alternative interpretation of structure in society, presented by the non-male dominant state of Amazons.

In this sense, dear Jury, the genocide is not only physical but also ideological. “Naturalisation” of male dominance had become possible after repeatedly recreated structures of male exclusivity and the idea of ‘natural hierarchy’ was instilled in the public’s unconscious for the millennia to come. To unwoven and undo this damage, inflicted on the multiplicity and richness of our thinking and understanding of possible, we will need centuries.

Zeus had damaged all of us, probably beyond repair. For the sake of distant hope for alternatives to come, we are ought to make an effort to try to mitigate the consequences of being trapped behind the walls, imprisoned in cages, exposed to whip lashes - all that we have been and continue receiving as natural. And doing this first of all requires new justice: towards those who had been violated, limited, annihilated, raped, abducted, made perish, forgotten, murdered, - some many times all over again.

Defence:

Dear Members of the Jury, I have to debunk all this prosecution’s nonsense about genocides. What the prosecutor calls ‘genocide’ is an installment of the very natural order in the most humane way by our gracious father. He had never instilled any specific stratagems on humans in devising their wars - but offered them choices and created a platform where they, in the natural struggle, would find the best way to govern themselves, reproduce, protect their offsprings, love and be loved. Amazons lost the war and perished in the memory, as many other cultures before and after them. There is nothing special about their fate. If this is a genocide, then I don’t know what we can call ‘civilisation’ or ‘culture’.

The distinguished members of the Jury - I call to your attention, consciousness, and logic once again. Our great father is not ideal. No one is. But he has, over the millennia of human history, provided us with multiple instances of choice for our own course in deciding the best way of co-existence and achievement of common goals. He showed us what ‘norm’ means and why it is important to build anything at all.

All the prosecution wants is chaos.

Prosecution and Defence together:

It is time for the Jury to cast their votes in the open.
The distinguished members of the Jury, dear citizens, we call upon your judgment to claim the definition of justice, taking it up into your own hands.
The godliness of gods is up to us to be determined.
Please raise your thumbs up if you consider the accused guilty of the charges brought.
Please lower your thumbs down if you consider the accused not guilty of those crimes.  

If found “not guilty” (Defence):

As the accused is cleared up of the charges brought, allow me to announce the restitution of our father in his divine right of the leader of the human order. No one is able to go through life, especially the eternal one, without accusations against them. What is important, however, is that we keep the power on its toes and always remind its principal archetype that we are closely watching and ready to bring the charges forward when we deem that necessary. Thank you all for performing your duty duly and well!

If found “guilty” (Prosecution): 

As the accused is found guilty, we must suspend the references to him and his power-imitating descendants as fatherly figures and authority. The political trial of several millennia of significance allows us to open up the potentiality for different futures. We must admit the necessity to turn the generational page and look for the council and model of justice at the gods that were condemned to eternal youth and inexperience, such as Athena, Dionysus, and other children of Zeus, his sisters, and brothers. It is time for the young to take their turn. The other worlds are possible and to start building it we first need to imagine them. 

“Beyond” the “Metaphysics” of “the West”: an Exercise of Critical Deconstruction

for Arts of the Working Class, issue 8 (fall 2019)

The vast multiplicity of the post-colonial criticism raises the issue of the necessity to find a way of the new framing for structuring the process of thinking about the fundamental subjects of socio-political discourse, such as justice. I would argue that without new structures of thinking and vocabulary we are hardly equipped in the quest of a search for viable alternatives to the neoliberal capitalist acceleration. The effective way to approach this tricky issue is the method of deconstruction, adopted from the philosophical (or rather essayistic?) practice of Jacques Derrida, an ‘incorruptible’ French thinker whose work still irritates analytical philosophers. I would propose to disassemble the notions within the title of this issue - “beyond”, “metaphysics” and “the west” - and strip them of preconceived imperialist and colonial notions, which go against a certain kind of supremacy in the definition of power, normality and domination.

Beyond —> Transpolitical Osmosis

Let’s start with the notion of ‘beyond’. It presupposes the presence of something “inner”, familiar, charted and enclosed and “outer” - other, unknown and probably posing danger. The separation between the known and the unknown creates the allegiances, identities and the sensation of belonging that is crucial for construction of the cultural and political imaginary in a traditional way. “Beyondness” gives a way for marking up the territory in geopolitical framing, but even more importantly - charting the borders in the mind. Not thinking beyond specific ‘red lines’ is a fixation on familiarity within the world of the possible in the imagined. Creative writing, arts and even psychedelic drugs can be described as the known passages towards transcending into “the beyond” from the familiarity of the known.

The illusion of a normative border, even as oppressive as it can be, serves the function of providing the safety in the psyche that is as important as physical safety - allowing planning, extrapolative thinking or extending the trends of the present and anticipation of the specific scenarios of the future as most probable, for example. Going “beyond” means a dangerous trip that cost one loss of the stability, home and belonging.

Cultures of the ancient world were interested in breaking through the inner-outer dichotomy, that is in the root of the suspiciousness towards the stranger. For example the protocol of theoxenia in the Ancient Mediterranean, which obliged everyone to treat strangers as if they were gods in disguise, as ‘xenos’ (etymologically ‘friend/enemy/guest’), effectively undermined the fixation of the political imaginary membranes of the poleis and kingdoms. In comparison to theoxenia, the practices of contemporary hospitality (in tourism for instance) or diplomacy (in politics) clearly highlight the distance between “the host” and “the guest” from somewhere beyond.

I propose to counter the notion of beyond with inclusive transpolitics of osmosis. Osmosis is defined biologically as the process by which “the molecules of a solvent tend to pass through the semipermeable membrane from the less concentrated solution to a more concentrated one” or culturally as “a process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas and knowledge”. Osmosis is the process which in both cases requires the concept of a border as something immaterial and penetrable, invisible and unnoticeable. Therefore communications of the molecules and bits of knowledge are transpolitical - they are not defined by the dichotomist “us and they, friend and enemy” logic but presupposes impossibility of sustaining life without the constant flow of exchange that is not governed by the changing constructs of the socio-political imaginary, installed by the power agents in order to emphasise and accumulate control in the system.

“Metaphysics” —> Anti-cavial

Now metaphysics. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave, and further into Aristotles’ introduction of the domains of philosophy and science, the fundamental boxing of the human experience includes the opposition of physics and metaphysics. Imperial adventures in Athens, Macedonia, Rome and Christendom,  were simplified as a justification of conquest in the name of“enlightening” the barbarians and “lesser peoples”, were the ones to universalized science and humanism towards post-Aristotelian standard.  

Metaphysics got “dumped into” anything that epistemology cannot deal with via uncompromising logic and empirical experiment, as well as cannot ‘touch’ or prove materially. The inherent inferiority of the humanities had planted unglamorous seeds, while further European-led (often with blood and fire) Enlightenment and establishment of the “cilos” in academies, effectively diverting the knowledge pathways in proximate inquiries with different methods further from one another. The allegory had become over time a dogma. Any holistic or polymathic pathways towards knowledge have been gradually referred to as charlatanisms, magical and unscientific in nature. A stark example is the current state of brain research (countering “left-right” lobes enclosed functionalities and zooming in on the all-penetrating and uniting neural networks) and a movement against organ-based medicine (the way most of the medical infrastructure, research fields and hospital buildings are built).

In order to be able to take the conversations about the holism of alternative approaches to structuring human experiences into forms of knowledge, we ought to leave the dogma of Plato’s cave. An anti-cavial approach to ideas and structuring knowledge leads to opening up critical capacities looking beyond the familiar ways of building up epistemological blocks of the self-referential pyramid of knowledge, which if they continue to build in this form will eliminate the other ways of looking at knowledge just from the perspective of transactional costs, inertia and swamping co-dependencies in mutually reaffirming references. Leaving the cave means opening up the mind towards possibility of radical alternatives in functionalization of the phenomenological experiences of the world around us.

“The West” —> Oecumene

The geopolitical idea of “The West” roots in the separation of the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire by the emperor Constantin which was later in history legitimised and instilled as “natural” in the imaginary by the succeeding Romans Christendom orchestra of the European kingdoms. If we rewind the history back towards 1 millennia BCE, even the mythological origins of the word “Europa” has little to do with how it is understood currently. Europa was a Phoenician ( Lebanon) princess, that was seduced and stolen by sky-god of Cretans Zeus, to be held in captivity on the island and give him children, that metaphorically represent the tribes of the Mediterranean basin.

In this time, as we can judge from the objects of literary and material heritage, the idea of the “geopolitics” wasn’t as dogmatic as it had become centuries later with the arrival of the concept of nation and united sovereignty -Leviathan. The world was seen instead as lined-up in borders of solid rock as the Oecumene - united by customs and protocols of interaction (like the aforementioned theoxenia example) trans-geographical space, where boundaries are fluid to the extent of the establishment of the contact between peoples inhabiting the shores. If we translate Oecumene borders in contemporary geopolitical language, it spanned the whole Mediterranean, Anatolia (modern Turkey), Middle East, Near East, Egypt, Horn of Africa, Persian Gulf, the Caucasus, modern Kazakhstan (probable location of the Amazons’ state) and Afghanistan, and arguably included regions as far as contemporary Ireland, the UK (there is evidence of cultural exchange and trade of objects in Archaic period, around 8 BCE) - and probably further.

This geography spanned far beyond the established Christendom allegiances that are perceived as transhistorical and somewhat eternal and was, quite possible, the truly cosmopolitan space united by the protocols of exchange and engagement many of which we have lost. The “island mentality” of contemporary Europe is a historical consequence of “caving in” the imaginary - what also led to intolerance towards otherness and imperial ambitions of standardisation of thinking, as I referred to in the section on metaphysics.

So what can be summed up as this new state of thinking, and be defined as the start of a new vocabulary? Here it is. An anti-cavial transpolitical osmosis in Oecumene

The Palace of Ritual

Artists: Isadorino Gore, Enam Gbewonyo, Florence Keith-Roach, Alena Ledeneva, Karolina Łebek, Lynn Lu, Nissa Nishikawa, Sabina Sallis, Zorka Wollny, Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll and Mengting Zhuo

Curated by: Annie Jael Kwan, Denis Maksimov, Michał Murawski and Kasia Sobucka

Palazzo Donà, San Polo, Venice
May 9-11 2019, 2 – 6pm

The Palace of Ritual is a programme of immersive, intimate performances, screenings and discursive workshops that aims to activate heterodox knowledges and practices of healing, sourced from myths, ritual and cosmology. Participants are invited to awake from the artificial psychological coma of the accelerating and verticalizing present, via healing rituals of care, levelling, perversion and futuring.

The programme explores why a return to ‘nature’ is an increasingly pressing need for many people today. Does our ‘post-contemporary’ (or metamodern) world, mediated as it is by unprecedented layerings of artificially intelligent technologies, paradoxically make so-called ‘traditional’ practices and rituals more desirable? What do the concepts of attachment to ritual, spirituality and nature mean today? We will revisit older, more divisive rituals, investigating what can be learned and appropriated from their obsolete and hierarchical but seductive styles, shapes and rhythms; and we will explore how rituals have been invented, reinvented and adapted today.

Ritual brings together aesthetic creation and a mythos-reinforcing re-enactment of collective histories; it caters to our primaeval need to belong; it consolidates but also – in liminal moments –perverts established social norms and hierarchies. The typology of the Palace – whether a Venetian Palazzo, a Qing dynasty summer residence looted by Lord Elgin or a socialist-era “people’s palace” – provides a grandiose and spectacular backdrop for rituals of every kind. The Palace of Ritual – and its interregional, intersectional programme – will explore some winding paths for forging new ritual bodies, ritual aesthetics and ritual politics: perverted, progressive and planetary.

The Palace of Ritual is initiated by Arts Territory and it launches its new pathway of nomadic, fluid and open agency: offering new models of arts commissioning and curating, supporting radical artistic experimentation, research and collaboration, alongside testing the new forms of curation.

The programme is devised by Arts Territory together with PASAR: Post-Asian School of Alternative Rites, is a new practice-based research project curated by Annie Jael Kwan; Perverting the Power Vertical, a research and arts initiative led by Masha Mileeva, Denis Maksimov and Michał Murawski; by the FRINGE Centre at University College London and by Avenir Institute.

The programme comprises performances; screenings; micro-symposia; and installations.

PERFORMANCE PROGRAMME
Enam Gbewonyo, Florence Keith-Roach, Lynn Lu, Karolina Łebek, and Mengting Zhuo

Enam Gbewonyo
Nude Me/ Under the Skin: The Awakening of Black Women’s Visibility one Pantyhose at a time.
(Performance of Healing that pays homage to Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P body of work.)
Enam’s work speaks to the sensuality of the female form as well as the elasticity and malleability of the human body. It represents the many forms of bondage that constrict the black woman to fit a mould that is not for her. Her movements morph into the traditional Ewe dance, Agbadza, this is the point of resistance and awakening. This dance functions as a process of healing which creates a flow of expansion and contraction linked to the body’s backbone. The piece centres around activating an artwork made from nylon tights and it includes sound and video installation. A hand knitted circular floor covering symbolising the third eye with an opening in the centre symbolising an oculus. Coupled with performance the third eye and oculus act as a portal to channel the stories of Enam’s matrilineal ancestors. The performance sees the artists as a central figure in conversation with four imaginary figures, the audiences will take position along the edges of the room. The piece includes the black women’s reclamation of self in the present achieved by channelling the pain of ancestors past and releasing it to arrive at a point of healing through accessing their (ancestors) love and acknowledging their beauty and worth.

Florence Keith-Roach
Straight Lines: reading of play excerpt with musical accompaniment.
Claire (30, British) and Kuba (33, Polish) are trapped in a never-ending queue outside a nightclub in Berlin, a famed palace of perversion whose doormen have a long-standing aversion to couples like them: square, straight, and clad in ill-fitting, borrowed, squeaking PVC outfits. They are cold, fractious, anxious and chafing. Over the course of their sojorn in this eternal, painfully straight queue, with the club and its intimidating promise of purchasable sexual ‘liberation’ looming ahead, the latent tensions that have led them to this imposing portal start to pulsate and pound to the surface.

Lynn Lu
The ocean’s refusal to stop kissing the shore
Referencing a poem by diaspora poet, Sarah Kay, PASAR presents a new performance-as-research project by Lynn Lu that recalls mythical vanished lands including Atlantis, Hyperborea, Thue, Mu, Rutas, Lemuria and Kumari Kandam, and scientifically confirmed ones such as Zealandia, Dvārakā, Sundaland, Kerguelen Plateau, Beringia , Maui Nui, Ferdinandea, Ravenser Odd, Dadu Island, Tebua Tarawa, and Abanuea. Sited at the fragile yet resilient island of Venice, slowly tilting and sinking since the 5^thcentury, old and reinvented rituals memorialise the eventful reconfigurations of land pay tribute to the rising waters. At The Palace of Ritual, with an accompanying audio track of mourning chants, the artist will lead a participatory-making session in which visitors can create personalized floating offerings for the sea using flowers, incense, etc. All the offerings will be set afloat in a nocturnal ritual. At different sites around the island – the artist leads a process of live inscription
~ at dawn, using a brush and brine - of the names of submerged and submerging land masses. As the sun grows hotter and evaporates the water, these names materialize in salt crystals. As the city awakens, pedestrian footfall gradually wears away the crystalline calligraphy.
~at the water’s edge and key locations - using Blutpudre which becomes visible when wet - so that the lapping waves or the next shower simultaneously exposes and washes away the names.

Karolina Łebek
Purge – DJ set
Purge, DJ set with vocals, approx. 40 mins Drawing on ancient practises of shamanic healing, Karolina Lebek will present a new sound performance, mixing live vocals with a specially designed immersive soundscape. Through an interest in mysticism and spirituality, Lebek will create a sonic space in which weaving a tapestry of pulsating rhythms will strive to reveal hidden energies and potentialities achieved through collective listening.

Mengting Zhuo
Six Crosses
PASAR presents Six Crosses, a durational participatory performance by Mengting Zhuo that offers a one-to-one experience of ‘Six Crosses’, a Chinese divination method stated in the I-Ching. Six lines or broken lines make a hexagram, and reading them can lead us to understand ‘synchronicity’, a term coined by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, who argues that we live in a space-time continuum. Six Crosses offers participants the opportunity to delve into their subconscious and reconnect the dots between signs, symbols and reality.

SCREENING PROGRAMME
Isadorino Gore, Karolina Łebek, Nissa Nishikawa, Sabina Sallis and Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll

Isadorino Gore
The Return of the Gift
This film documents a ritual dance, enacting the receipt and return of a gift given by power, performed in July 2018 in the newly-opened Zaryadye Park in Moscow, adjacent to the Kremlin. The film documents ritual meditating on and enacting ‘democratic’ forms of spending time, an entreaty (chelobitye) and an expression of heartfelt gratitude to the Tsar. The Kremlin features in (almost) every shot, a silent participant in the ritual.

Karolina Łebek
Watra  
In her work Karolina Lebek explores her Lemko heritage through the medium of traditional song and singing as one of the factors that continue to unite this now dispersed community. The artist investigates themes of migration, displacement and assimilation informed by experiences of the Lemko community - an ethnic minority forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland in the Carpathian Mountains in a series of violent deportations, culminating in Operation Vistula in 1947. Throughout the tragic history of the banished Lemkos, worship and singing have remained crucial and unifying factors in recognising and maintaining a shared sense of cultural identity, revealing unique mythologies, forgotten rituals and rites of passage. Lebek draws on the cultural, spiritual and personal accounts of violence, trauma and shame manifested through generations to create a musical, performative and visual experience in which the wounded voices of the past mould into a song in the present, striving for recognition and reparation. This work takes inspiration from the ‘watra’ - a large bonfire, built to evoke memories of things past, or to revive a sense of community.

Nissa Nishikawa
Relations of Fire
Fire is regarded as the highest active and adaptable element. One in essence, though manifests itself in three general species-celestial, subterraneous and culinary. It is the cause of all motion, consequently of all mutation or change in nature. It is the principle of all generation and the primal source of all forms. It is the nature of light. Found in the sun and the fixed stars, all light proceeds from this. The planets and comets and earth reflect it. And we, the bodies on the earth, observe this light. Turning towards the wild, this open-air performance regards dance, sound and installation and its relationship to pyromancy and husbandry, observing the lyricisms in their violent and concentrated actions.

Sabina Sallis
Thought World and the Society of Nature, 2017
These are video-thoughts- collages that were made during a residency at Labverde in the Amazon Jungle, Brazil. The videos are singular meditations upon the Amazonian landscape, its thoughts and its ‘living logic’. Drawing from diverse ideas such as Eduardo Kohn’s notion of semiotic beings and sylvan thinking, and Descola’s framework of the ‘four ontologies’- animism, totemism, naturalism and analogism. The video-thoughts employ methods of thinking and making that magnify how we relate and profoundly interact with complex ecosystems, and how mindful, humane and sustainable politics can grow out from appreciative and sensitive engagement with nature-culture.

Zorka Wollny
Slavness
The aim of the Slavness is to mark the field of the meaning of a woman’s freedom and the categories of pace, sound, movement, light, voice, gesture and hearing.  The title is based on the play of words between the naming of doing something unhurriedly and the situation of subordination. “Being docile to someone” means submissiveness, submission, loss of control, immobilization.  Being subordinate releases the desire to be released from bondage, the need for self-determination. The necessary revolution is not always visible, but it will sprout subcutaneously, underground, under the ice, under the crust of visible surfaces. Doing something slowly, in concentration, is also a matter of daily effort, which enables long-lasting, persistent and joint action.

Khadija Von Zinnenburg Carroll
Cook’s New Clothes
This film documents two processional performances – held on the grounds of palaces of British maritime imperialism, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and Queen’s House in Plymouth – commemorating 250 years since Tupaia, the Tahitian priest, navigator and translator, boarded the Endeavour with Captain James Cook in 1768. Cook’s New Clothes comprises two monumental, collaborative and subversive processions, which critically reimagine and reconfigure the aesthetics and politics of Cook’s voyages.

INSTALLATIONS
Alena Ledeneva, Zorka Wollny

Alena Ledeneva
Patterns of Informal Power
The FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity will present Patterns of Informal Politics, a new series of artworks by Professor Alena Ledeneva (University College London). Ledeneva’s piece is composed of three monumental components: Inner Circle, Scapegoat and Suspended Punishment.  ‘Complex phenomena are best to communicate in a non-verbal communication mode: visual, emotional, associative. Patterns are not intended to illustrate the workings of informal politics, but to reveal the hidden patterns of power – both modern and ancient – and to provoke the audience to develop insights into power’s four dimensions.’

Zorka Wollny
Healing Song

SYMPOSIA
A programme of performative and perverted symposia, convened by Perverting the Power Vertical and the Avenir Institute.

Perverting the Power Vertical
Towards a Perverted Palatiality
What are the uses of the “Palace”, and of different types of grandiose, monumental, luxurious, vertical and patriarchal objects – and the rituals, processions and parades, which take place within and around them; how can we seize, appropriate, repurpose, undercut, trick, twist and pervert palatial forms?
With: Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Professor of Global Art, Birmingham, artist; Michał Murawski, Lecturer in Critical Area Studies, SSEES, UCL; Denis Maksimov, Avenir Institute; Maria Mileeva, UCL

The Palace of (Soft) Power
What does it mean to give a Palace as a gift? What are the aesthetics, architectures and rituals of informal economic and political practices, of bribery and subterfuge, of scapegoats and inner circles?
With:Alena Ledeneva, Professor of Politics and Society, UCL; artist; Jasmina Cibić, artist, London; Peter Zusi, UCL

LECTURE-PERFORMANCES (by AVENIR INSTITUTE)
The Pythian Games of Futures
During lecture-performance, Avenir Institute will present the results of investigation of the Delphi archaeological site as the transcultural centre of the rituals of futures-making and foresight methodologies. They will focus the speculative analysis of what is currently called Temple of Athena Pronaia and Tempe of Apollo in the past and their possible futures. The Athena Pronaia Foresight Centre and The Dionysos Thrice-Born Avenirologic Centre, the institutions referring to the truthful nature of the mentioned Delphic sites which are currently in charge of the preparation of the Pythian Games of Futures, will be presented. With Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen

The Penelopiad Project
During lecture-performance, Jeanne Pansard-Besson and Denis Maksimovwill readout parts from Homer’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood The Penelopiad, enacting the dialogue of authorship across the millennia of history within the omnipresent narrative. The irony will clash with epos and the invisible props will enter the conversation with the highlighted heroes. The audience will be served figs, watered down wine and honey - as were the suitors for Penelope’s hand in Ithaca.

PROFILES OF DEVISING COLLECTIVITIES

Arts Territory is a not-for-profit arts organisation with a mission to support artists in creating new work. We work across borders and facilitate dialogue between artists, curators and communities internationally. Operating as a nomadic, fluid and open agency, Arts Territory offers a new model of arts commissioning, supporting radical artistic experimentation, research and collaboration, alongside testing new forms of curation and expanding the agency of curating.

Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics and Aesthetics in the Global East
PPV – convened by Maria Mileeva, Michał Murawski and Denis Maksimov –is an anomadic seminar, event and research platform operating from within the interstices of UCL. PPV deploys the idea of the “Power Vertical” – a term used in some parts of the Global East to refer to various styles of post-Soviet authoritarian politics – as a loose conceptual pivot. PPV seeks to understand how the power vertical works, and to map its styles, shapes and affects; but it also aims to develop tactics to ridicule, trick, twist, undercut, queer, resist and pervert it.

AVENIR INSTITUTE is a think-do tank at the intersection of epistemology, politics, technology and aesthetics with a focus on critical analysis of potentiality in futures. We produce and present transdisciplinary research and design as academic publications, lectures, foresight consulting, exhibitions, performances and festivals. The Institute was co-founded in 2015 by Denis Maksimov and Timo Tuominen and established nodes in Brussels, Berlin, London and Athens since then.

THE FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity explores the roles that complexity, ambivalence and immeasurability play in social and cultural phenomena. A cross-disciplinary initiative bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, FRINGE examines how seemingly opposed notions such as centrality and marginality, and clarity and ambiguity can shift and converge when embedded in everyday practices. FRINGE is based at UCL’s School of Slavic and East European Studies (SSEES) and Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS).

PASAR – POST-ASIAN SCHOOL OF ALTERNATIVE RITES is a new practice-based research project curated by Annie Jael Kwan that explores how artists might confront contemporary anxieties including global environmental and climate changes, coastal frontiers and the oceanic, via decolonial and feminist strategies. PASAR (translated as ‘market’) presents a diverse and bustling diasporic post-Asian world where co-existent gods, ghosts, spiritualism, magicks, predictive texts, cosmographic rites continue to persist in and pervade socio-political systems, cultural life, and in the cyclical and non-linear exchanges and transactions between generations and communities.

SUPPORTED BY
Adam Mickiewicz Institute,
The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London,
The FRINGE Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity,  Istituto Polacco in Rome.
The PASAR: Post-Asian School of Alternative Rites is presented in collaboration with Something Human and Asia-Art-Activism and additionally supported by Arts Council England.

Theoxenia as Politics for Shared Futures

The term ‘hospitality’ has many distinctive definitions and origins.

In Ancient Greece one of the most important protocols of diplomacy was called xenia. Xenos (ξένος, “alien”, “foreign”, “strange”, “unusual”, “guest”) is an ambiguous term that had been used in Greek poetry from at least Homer onwards. The interpretation of it fluctuates from ‘stranger’ to ‘guest friend’ all the way to ‘enemy’.

Xenia as a protocol of relating to the Other played incremental role in the narratives that came down to us from Ancient Greek poets. In the last book of Homer’s The Iliad the king of Troy Priam comes to the camp of Achaeans to claim the body of his fallen son Hector and the Greek hero Achilles, abiding by the rules of xenia, allows him to stay and provides food, warm bed and entertainment despite the hostilities on the battlefield and his own personal rage over the death of Patroclus, his closest confidant and lover.

The respect towards unknown Other was a subject of special importance since (s)he/them could have been a disguised god. The protocol of ancient hospitality could be more accurately defined as theoxenia (θεός “god”), a hospitality towards a possible god who can appear in a disguise of a humble stranger. In the first book of The Odyssey, Telemachus welcomes masked as a maiden Athena in his home and protects her from the rude suitors of his mother. He exercises the ritual of xenia and earns her favour and this act led to change of the heart of the goddess towards his father Odysseus, cursed by her for stealing a sacred statue of Athena from Troy’s temple in order to bring the victory to Achaeans in the 10 years war. Athena’s aid to Odysseus further was earned by his son’s act of hospitality.

There are several key differences between hospitality in contemporaneity and the ancient Greek protocol of theoxenia.

First of all, theoxenia is unconditional. Mourning Achilles neither welcoming Priam in his camp in hope for a reciprocity or while plotting a stratagem to use the king of Troy for the sake of some future act of revenge, nor he shows in this way his moral and ethical superiority by being so generous towards the enemy. He simply obeys the sacred rule of hospitality as if it would be an answer to the equation of two plus two. In order words, his approach to hospitality there is beyond selfish: it is ritualistic and cultural rather than opportunistic, pitiful or predatory.  

Secondly, theoxenia protects the perpetual peace and excludes psychological or any other form of violence. Allow me to elaborate here. The contemporary political interpretation of the term hospitality is closely tied with terms like integration, assimilation and tolerance. All three of them are presuming, although not admitting, an act of violence on the subjectivity of a guest/stranger. The agencies of integration and assimilation demand from the Other to assume traditions and norms of the society, in which her/him/them are integrating, as new fundamentals. Ultimately, they violently break the subjectivity that the Other had before the integration or assimilation process had begun. Tolerance of a host to a guest, on the other hand, is a mind construct of the borders of acceptable freedom within the cage of subjective reality defined as principal within the society that is tolerating the guest. Telemachus protects disguised in a clothes of shallow woman Athena from the drunk suitors of his mother Penelope, risking his life, in order to prevent the act of rape that is considered not far beyond ordinary towards the woman of unknown provenance in Ithaca. He places the respect the protocol of theoxenia over the normality of the socio-political order, preventing the violence even as it is justified by local norms, therefore he stands against the local tradition and identity.

Thirdly, theoxenia is transnational, transcultural and universal. While contemporary hospitality is distinctly different among the people belonging to the same tribes - racially, socially, politically, ethnically, linguistically, etc - theoxenia is equal in the face of any otherness. Trojans are foreigners to Greeks, and all foreigners are considered Barbarians by the Achaeans, having different norms and understanding of justice. Achilles however treats Priam as a relative of his own. Disguised Athena is a traveller of unknown origin, an ultimate foreigner, but she receives protection of the prince of Ithaca.

Contemporary hospitality is cruel, selfish, hostile and reciprocally economical. We talk about migrants and refugees, nomads and travellers (relating to them as ‘tourists’) as a livestock on the meat farm, economic items, the biomass that is meant to be violently integrated, assimilated, serviced and entertainment if they have money; and at the best tolerated by our ‘normalised’ orders of the societies. The condition of perpetual peace is simply impossible as the inflicted on the Other violence internalises in the form of deep sleeping trauma, which will eventually reemerge. It is not surprising to me, for example, that sociologists from the Berlin Institute for Population and Development report “that foreigners who come to live in Germany tend to remain strangers, even after 50 years and three generations in some cases”. It is not the failure of integration, as it is wrongly portrayed by the analysts - but the failure of hospitality.

There is a better way to understand, teach about and explain hospitality than elaborating inevitability of cultural, social and political violence, that is meant to be inflicted on the Other who found themselves in the geopolitical space of your norms. In the face of Pangaeac challenges such as climate change, resurgence of narrow mindedness, nationalism and imperialism - it is the time to rid off tribal understanding of the world and explore the universal protocol of humanity within all of us.

“Ben(d)ghazi”, 2018

This Storm is What We Call Progress

“ ’Tis but a tent where takes his one day’s rest

A Sultan to the realm of death addressed.

The Sultan rises and the dark Ferrash

Strikes, and prepares it for another guest.”

Difficult, indeed, it is, judicially to handle a subject where even probable truth will hardly gain assent. In the affairs of war we excel those of our enemies, who adhere to methods opposite to our own. In our manner of living we show an elegance tempered with frugality, and we cultivate philosophy without enervating the mind. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

And yet we pass the soundest judgements, and are quick at catching the right apprehensions of things, not thinking that words are prejudicial to actions, but rather the not being duly prepared by previous debate before we are obliged to proceed to execution. Envy will exert itself against a competitor while life remains; but when death stops the competition, affection will applaud without restraint. Moreover, we may hence conclude that there is great hope that death is a blessing. And if it is a privation of all sensation, as it were, a sleep in which the sleeper has no dream, death would be a wonderful gain; for thus all futurity appears to be nothing more than one night.

To conquer we have need to dare, to dare again, ever to dare!

Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. History teaches us that no oppressed class has ever come into power and cannot come into power, without passing through a period of dictatorship, that is, the conquest of power and forcible suppression of the most desperate and mad resistance which does not hesitate to resort to any crimes, such has always been shown by the exploiters. And by the hundreds of thousands today we find our own people have become impatient, turning away from your white nationalism, which you call democracy, toward the militant, uncompromising policy of black nationalism. There is no system more corrupt than a system that represents itself as example of freedom, the example of democracy, and can go all over this earth telling other people how to straighten out their house, when you have citizens of this country who have to use bullets if they want to cast a ballot.

We are new brooms; let us see that we sweep the right rooms. For it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head. There is no jewel, be it of never so rich a price, which I set before this jewel: I mean your love. For I do esteem it more than any treasure or riches; for that we know how to prize, but love and thanks I count invaluable. Neither do I desire to live longer days than I may see your prosperity and that is my only desire. I have ever used to set the Last Judgement Day before mine eyes and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before higher judge, and now if my kingly bounties have been abused and my grants turned to the hurt of my people contrary to my will and meaning, and if any in authority under me have neglected or perverted what I have committed to them, I hope God will not lay their culps and offenses in my charge. Let tyrants fear; I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects.

To be a king and to wear a crown is a thing more glorious to them that see it than it is pleasant to them that bear it. In such a time of necessity those who act in the name of God are not those who, citing Bible quotations, wander idly about the country and spend the day partly doing nothing and partly criticising the work of others; but those whose prayers take the highest form of uniting man with his God, that is the form of work. I encourage you from time to time and always in respectful manner to question my logic. If you’re unconvinced with a particular plan of action I’ve decided is the wisest then tell me so. But allow me to convince you and I promise you right here and now - no subject will ever be taboo.

Except of course the subject that was just under discussion. The price you pay for bringing it up: I collect your fucking head! Now, if any of you, son of bitches got anything else to say now is the fucking time!

Ours is a righteous cause. The enemy shall be defeated. Victory will be ours.

The text was read publicly by Denis Maksimov (Avenir Institute) at the opening lecture-performance of the total installation “Storming” by Alexander Shishkin-Hokusai in London. It features quotations (in the order of appearance) from Omar Khayyam, Pericles, John F. Kennedy, Socrates, Georgres Danton, Petyr Baelish, Vladimir Lenin, Malcolm X, Lady Astor, Elizabeth Tudor, Adolf Hitler, O-Ren Ishii and Vyacheslav Molotov.