Landscapes after the Catharsis

Iván de la Nuez, Alexei Yurchak, Layla Martínez and Juan Cárdenas

Three decades after the boring liberal future prophesied by Francis Fukuyama, posthistory has passed into the annals of history. This truth forces us to acknowledge that the euphemisms we have used during this time in a bid to bail out the boat have been of little use. Among other reasons because following the successive collapses of communism and social democracy, the department of demolitions is now seriously turning its attention to that liberalism, as happy as it is fallacious, sold to us thirty years ago as the ineffable bridge to eternity.

This train has stopped at a station where “everlasting” liberalism has been replaced by capitalism, nothing but capitalism or “capitalism, alone”, as foretold by Branko Milanović. An authoritarianism of the market—increasingly detached from democracy—that holds sway as the model of our times.

Nor is it any consolation to continue stretching that tyranny of the catharsis that provides us with a basis—on the customary digital media and platforms—not for changing the world, but for resigning ourselves to denouncing it; instead of defining it, we have settled for renaming it.

It should be remembered, moreover, that posthistory turned twilight into the most profitable of its cultural products, dispensing to all and sundry obituaries for art and the novel, ideology and revolution, utopias and the elites.

It is in this state of affairs that, bored of a boredom that never arrived, we situate Landscapes after the Catharsis, a public programme by instalments that will function as an ongoing series. 

A project that touches down in the twenty-first century, the first quarter of which has already been and gone; a project through which we hope to find the keys that go beyond the exposition of crises and stagnations from which we need to escape.

PROGRAM

Wednesday 7 May at 7 pm
Landscapes after the Catharsis
Opening address by Iván de la Nuez (Havana, Cuba, 1964). Essayist, critic and curator residing in Barcelona. He is the director of this outreach programme. Among his published books are: La balsa perpetua, El mapa de sal, Fantasía roja, El comunista manifiesto, Teoría de la retaguardia, Cubantropía, Posmo and Iconofagias (Un diccionario del siglo XXI). The exhibitions he has curated include Cuba: The Possible Island, Human Park, Postcapital, Atopia: Art and City in the Twenty-first Century, Iconocracy, Never Real / Always True and The Parallel Utopia. 
LAB Auditorium. Free admission with prior booking. 

Wednesday 14 May at 7 pm
Is It Possible to Talk of Hypernormalisation Today?
Alexei Yurchak (St. Petersburg, Soviet Union, 1960). When the Soviet system entered its death throes, its imminent demise was inconceivable to society and the elites, who preferred to turn a blind eye and carry on as they were. This attitude was described by Alexei Yurchak, Professor of Anthropology at Berkeley, as a state of “hypernormalisation”. Two decades after the end of the USSR, capitalism’s financial crash raised doubts about the widespread superstition that capitalism—swollen with pride over its victory in the Cold War—would always be “everlasting”. The British filmmaker and writer Adam Curtis appropriated Yurchak’s concept and “hypernormalisation” developed into a term capable of explaining the respective crises in the two opposing systems of the twentieth century. In this, the third decade of the twenty-first century, what remains of that concept and how can it be applied to the new world order today?
Espai 4. Conversation online. Free admission with prior booking.

Wednesday 28 May at 7 pm  
The Zones: Do the Strugatsky Brothers Dream of Elon Musk?
Layla Martínez (Cuenca, Spain, 1987). The narrator, essayist and poet Layla Martínez has resituated the value of utopia in a world that repudiates it, while at the same time opening up a futuristic realm beyond the establishment of “utopia” as an exclusive synonym of technology. In her essay Utopía no es una isla, Martínez achieves this by interweaving critique, humanism and science fiction. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the National Book Award for her novel Carcoma, published in an English translation as Woodworm. Her other published books include El libro de la crueldad and Cineraria.
LAB Auditorium. Free admission with prior booking.

Tuesday 14 October at 7 pm 
The What versus the How: Contemporary Art and Critical Writing 
A novelist and essayist, Cárdenas’s books are all journeys back and forth between seemingly irreconcilable worlds: Europe and Latin America, art and science, substrata and surface. In his most recent essay, La ligereza, he addresses an abyss that intellectuals find difficult to face: the abyss into which, despite the many revolutions in the realm of museums, “the people and art have been cast”, where everything is arranged in order to “seduce the boss or supplant them”. The abyss in which we are capable of fetishising everything from good causes to their true or supposed subjects of redemption.
Espai 4. Online conversation. Free entry, limited places.