Anton Vidokle

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Based on the ideas of Russian philosopher, Nikolai Fedorov, Anton Vidokle’s film was shot in Siberia, Crimea, and Kazakhstan. Fedorov, like others, believed that death was a mistake, “because the energy of cosmos is indestructible, because true religion is a cult of ancestors, because true social equality is immortality for all.” Fedorov was one of the Cosmo-Immortalists, a surge of thinkers that emerged in Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They linked Western Enlightenment with Russian Orthodoxy and Eastern philosophical traditions, as well as Marxism, to create an idiosyncratically concrete metaphysics. For the Russian cosmists, cosmos did not mean outer space: rather, they wanted to create “cosmos” on earth. “To construct a new reality, free of hunger, disease, violence, death, need, inequality – like communism.”

Anton Vidokle, born in 1965 in Moscow, Russia, is an artist, curator, and filmmaker currently living in New York and Berlin. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Dakar Biennale, and at Tate Modern. He is the founder of e-flux.

Contact: contact@e-flux.com, www.e-flux.com
Cast: Iman Musa Kulmohhametov, Svetlana
Director of photography: Marcello Bozzini
Editor: Meggie Schneider
Sound: Jochen Jezussek
Music: John Cale
Format: QuickTime ProRes, Colour
Running time: 30 min
Language: English