Is It Possible to Talk of Hypernormalisation Today? By Alexei Iurtxak

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?

Wednesday 28 May at 7 pm  
The Zones: Do the Strugatsky Brothers Dream of Elon Musk?
Layla Martínez

Tuesday 14 October at 7 pm
The What versus the How: Contemporary Art and Critical Writing 
Juan Cárdenas