In ORTA’s Spectacular Experiments, which are always site-specific, mise-en-scène arises from the unpredictable monologues, sounds, and movements of a wide variety of people on the one hand, and equally surprising, mobile, sometimes exceptionally large-scale trash compositions on the other. One can always sense the endless, un-appropriable movement of thought and matter fluxes that carry, permeate, and reassemble all the moments of the performance, plunging it into a zone of indistinguishability between the imaginary and the real.

According to Evald Ilyenkov, the dialectic process must have no beginning and no end; it must be infinitely circular. Such an infinite circulation presupposes that at the end of every cosmic period, every humanity takes the decision to explode itself and thus let the universe start a new cosmic period. Here dialectical materialism is inscribed not merely into historical materialism but into the symbolic exchange between universe and humanity, between nature and spirit.

Art has from the very beginning been deeply intertwined with reflections on our position within the cosmos and what this might teach us of mortality. My goal with “Cosmos Cinema” was to consider how these themes are addressed by artists working both historically and today, and to place these artists into new sets of relations.

Andreeva’s cosmos is a place not to be conquered technologically but to be imagined on its own terms. In the tradition of Russian cosmism, with its utopian and technically unspecific dreams of resurrecting all the dead fathers buried on earth and resettling them on distant twinkling planets, we might say, borrowing from Robert Bird, that she is cosmic-minded, rather than space-race minded.

How should Eisenstein’s double-page collage from an unrealized 1927 film adaptation of Marx’s Capital be seen today, almost a hundred years later? I would suggest reading these pages as proto-cinematic cartography, a divination which addresses future cinema as a chaosmos: a montage of the visceral, the sensuous, and the sidereal, cosmic dimensions which exclude homogeneous linear temporality.

Methodologically speaking, it might be said that all of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s installations are in some way or another connected with a special structured experience of space, echoing the transformations of the starry sky. But there is one installation in which the sky also becomes the center of gravity. We are talking about perhaps their most famous installation, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, first shown in the Kabakovs’ Moscow studio in 1985. The viewer is presented with a room in a communal apartment that has been sealed off by investigators. The room’s resident has, with the help of a homemade device, escaped Soviet reality and is hiding in the sky.

I would say that contemporary civilization is a civilization in which nothingness has disappeared. Kabakov’s treatment of garbage still retains the intuition of nothingness. He assumes that it is possible to disappear into nothingness, and he often describes it—for example, as a departure into outer space from one’s room.

What Caused the Crisis of Theories of Emancipation? The current war in Ukraine has revealed numerous inconsistencies in certain left-leaning political theories—theories that have been regarded as cornerstones of emancipatory thought and practice. These theories propose alternatives to liberal-democratic mantras of “real politics.” 1 The liberal-democratic worldview at issue here is well known: Western democracy is an advanced and civilized form of social organization; representative…