Citizens of the Cosmos book launch at ICI Berlin

Please join us at ICI Berlin on Tuesday, May 7 at 7pm for a conversation between Boris Groys, Marietta Kesting, Elena Vogman, and Anton Vidokle in celebration of the launch of Citizens of the Cosmos (2024), co-published by Sternberg Press and Sirius Arts Centre.

Cosmism was an interdisciplinary movement intertwining Marxist discourse, Orthodox Christianity, Enlightenment thought, and Eastern philosophical traditions, advancing speculative models of international socialism, the quest for immortality, and the potential for resurrection through technological means in an imagined not so distant future. These visionary models provided a groundwork for discussion on the materialization of these aspirations within the realms of art, society, and science. How does the historical movement of cosmism, which found an important echo in the Soviet socialist experiment, provide the ground for (re)thinking the temporal relations between cosmos and commons, between community and communism? What is the relation between ancient cosmologies and cosmist ideas about death and immortality?

The discussion will be complemented by a screening of Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep (2022, 47 minutes, directed by Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan). Inspired by Sumerian cosmology as well as the philosophy of cosmism, the film follows the journey of Gilgamesh—part God, part human ruler of Uruk, one of the first historical metropolises—in this remarkable staging of a female heroine on her quest for immortality. Accompanied by an original score by Alva Noto, the film features an all-woman cast of actors from the Amed Theater in Diyarbakır. It interweaves the cosmist discourse with the quest for youth and immortality in one of the oldest literary works discovered to date.

Citizens of the Cosmos 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.

Citizens of the Cosmos is edited by Miguel Amado, associate edited by Ben Eastham and Hallie Ayres, and designed by Atelier d’Alves. The book runs 312 pages, with 42 color illustrations of high-res stills from the films, and is distributed by Sternberg Press and MIT Press under the ISBN 978-1-915609-15-1.