Training for the Future in 2021 took place simultaneously in different localities across the world, focusing on questions of collectiveness and collectivization: Between our different pasts and presents, are there shared futures?
Training for the Future is a utopian training camp that turns audiences into trainees, rehearsing alternative futures in a time of increasing dystopian normativity. This second edition happened in the midst of a global pandemic taking a decentralized form manifesting simultaneously in different localities in five continents. Focusing on concrete geographic, social and political contexts each training addressed planetary problems from a local point of view.
The coronavirus crisis has made visible the devastating consequence of our weakened structures of common life support. As a result, the demand for universal healthcare, well paid care workers and cleaners and basic income had strengthened, making visible what Jodi Dean has called a “collective desire for collectivity.”
Therefore, this edition of Training for the Future was structured around the changing notions of collectivity, collectives and collectivizations. What cooperative models enable new understandings of collectivity? How does the idea of collectivization and the collective resonate in different cultures and geographies around the world?
Each training took place under regionally specific pandemic circumstances, shaped by the need to take care of others and oneself, meaning that the size of participation and the form of each training differed in each locality. Despite the decentralized nature of this edition, Training for the Future 2021 insisted on the importance of physical assemblies and the role of art, culture, activism and social organization to shape our collective desire for collectivity into solidary presents and shared futures.
Artist: Jonas Staal / Curator & co-programmer: Florian Malzacher / Coordinator Studio Jonas Staal: Nadine Gouders / Co-programmers Zurich: Hayat Erdoğan and Nikolai Prawdzic Performing Architecture/Goethe-Institut: Susanne Traub / Visual Identity: Studio Remco van Bladel / Website Development: Studio RGB
Co-produced by Goethe-Institut / Performing Architecture Venice & Theater Neumarkt
