5th Metahuman Futures Forum – Lesvos – 2025

Decelerating Extinction:

Pathways to Liveable & Flourishing Metahuman Futures

A Meta-academic Metahumanities Encounter

>>>> 5th MFF Programme and Abstracts – pdf

Guest Speakers:

John Zerzan, Pierre Jouventin, Émile P. Torres,

Sophie Gosselin & David G. Bartoli, Rimona Afana.

24th-25th May 2025, in Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece

University of the Aegean. Department of Cultural Tecnology and Communication, Geography Building.

Part of the TRASH-HUMAN & METAHUMAN STUDIES programme.

Part of the Metahuman Futures Forum Series,

Part of the BODYNET-KHORÓS  project: BODYNET-KHORÓS LAB 18

CLOSING ACTIVITY OF THE PROJECT!

Video links:

Exhibition catalogue – PDF: 5th Metahuman forum 2025- exhibition catalogue

The conference and exhibition in Mytilene:

Labs in Eressos and Kroussos: Metasexual Lab at the queer festival and outdoors experimentations preparing the methodology of future outdoors labs, camping, building with organic materials and gathering plants, and exploring disaligned movement and metaformance outdorrs, and collaborating and the Donkey Centre animal Sanctuary with Menga.

Sustainable travelling by sailboat from Athens to Lesvos by three event and project coorganisers, on the boat Martha, thanks to the kind offer by Aleksandra Lukaszewicz and the captain Eilif Olsen:

This year’s forum features highly prominent figures such as John Zerzan, the leading voice of anarcho-primitivism since the 1980s and author of 9 books such as Future Primitive;  the renowned French ecologist and ethologist Pierre Jouventin, author of a dozen books such as L’homme, cet animal raté, in which he fiercely critiques the failure of human domination, which is headed toward collapse;  philosopher Émile P. Torres, an expert in the critique of transhumanism and long-termist and TESCREAL ideologies, as well as in the philosophy of extinction, who will explore how transhumanism accelerates extinction; Sophie Gosselin and David G. Bartoli, co-authors of important books that call for ontological shifts that dismantle dominant thinking, toward terrestrial communities; and Rimona Afana, an anti-speciesist artist and theorist, who will question the lines between biodiversity and the rights of other animals.

It will be a slow forum with a lot of time for eachtalk and for debates. Jaym* del Val, Aleksandra Lukaszewicz and Jean-Marc Matos are travelling by sailboat to Lesvos, from Athens, as ecological excercise in less dusruptive nomadisms, thanks to Aleksandra Lukaszewicz’s generous offer. As in previous years it will be a fully “holocaust-free”, VEGAN event.

COMUNICADO DE PRENSA  en Español / Press summay in Spanish

https://www.facebook.com/metabody.project/posts/1018772783682410

https://x.com/MetaBodyMadrid/status/1922955764294971643

Organising Committee: Jaime del Val (Reverso/Metabody), Aleksandra Lukaszewicz (Polish Society for Aesthetics, Poland), Joaquín Fernández-Mateo (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid).

Local Organising Committee and Hosting: Evi Sampanikou, Nikolitsa Gourgouli, and the Mytilene Bodynet-Khorós Project Team,  University of the Aegean.

https://metabody.eu/5th-metahuman-futures-forum/

Presentation

In the words of United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Monday, 7th November 2022 at COP27,“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator. […] Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.” In times when all of humanity would be expected to be desperately working together to avoid collapse what we have is instead a generalised denial: people in universities keep working on abstract topics, governments of all signs keep fanatically promoting the “progress” that is paving our wayto extinction, and even environmental organisations ignore and silence the core issues: shift to plant-based diets, deep degrowth and addressing overpopulation as the unavoidable but ignored problems.

On the one hand, we have the radical dystopia of Trump-Musk supremacist fascism accelerating our way to collapse dramatically; on the other, we have a global left, including activists and intellectuals, that represent just a milder version of the same fanatic human supremacism and belief in human progress and expansion.How can we exit this loop? Or are we to merely assume our imminent extinction, once we disavow false trash-human beliefs in digital inmortality and cosmic flight?

What are the mechanisms, besides disinformation promoted by the super-rich, leading to this fanatical denialism? How can we address the hidden human supremacism in all of us, starting with academia, critical intellectuals, activists, and artists from the global north, who pertain to the 10% of the global privileged population and don’t want to lose their privileges? And how can we extend our networks of cooperation beyond these circles, encompassing more and more different others, from different cultures of the Global South, different social strata, and other species?

Already in 2003, the documentary The Corporation was exposing how current societies have an intrinsically psychopathic profile. In the new Trump-Musk Era, this seems to rise to new unimaginable heights, while Silicon Valley shows the intrinsic neofascism it always had, disguised till now behind fallacies of liberation and emancipation, as in all techno-optimisms. Is there a way out of that psychopathy, other than a quick extinction? What are the deep roots of this situation? Could they be in millennia of sensorimotor aliennation in sedentary societies, that have resulted in an egocentric, self-obsessed individual?

This forum aims at addressing the radical crisis of the present without palliatives, putting at the centre the elephant in the room: the denialism going on in supposedly critical milieus of the global north. Exposing the dead ends and fallacies of a hidden supremacism philosophy, the forum aims to break through the global wall of silence and denialism for an eventual deceleration on the Highway to Extinction.

The Metahuman lens will be once more the field proposed for addressing both a deeper self-critique than is mostly present in critical posthumanism, ontologically hacking the hidden supremacism in us, and a broader vision for potential transformations beyond the cultures of dominion that, since 10,000 years approx. have unleashed the quickest mass extinction on Earth. Outlining a potential metahuman mutation implies undoing the dead ends and fallacies of false criticality and supremacist denialism.

Topics

  • The Algoricene or Trash-human Age of Extinctions and Algorithms
    • Human Supremacism and denialism
    • Transhumanism and TESCREAL as Trash-humanism? Trash-human unhancement, hyperhumanism and the real faces of transhumanist culture
      • Is AI a technofascist dystopia without a future, given its intrinsic environmental and social unsustainability and its unlikely continuation in the upcoming climate chaos?
      • New technofascisms and how to respond to disinformation. What are the millennia-old roots of disinformation culture, as based on media that separate us, immobilise us, and homogenise perception, such aslinear perspective?
      • Which are the radical challenges of current algorithmic culture, such as the ontological opacity of current Big data and Large Langue Models?
    • The Extinction Crisis
      • Extinction and collapse studies.
      • Biodiversity, Climate change, Planetary Boundaries.
      • The Planetary Holocaust, Speciesism:
        • non human animals and other life forms: farm animals, wildlife, plants, ecosystems and all life forms,
        • the Planetary Holocaust of Animal Exploitation Food Industries, as not only largest killing machine, but the most polluting and devastating one.
      • Human occupation of the Earth and the excesses of sedentary civilization.
      • Human multiplication and the problematic nature of heteronormative regimes of reproduction.
      • Exponentiality and imminence of the crises.
  • The Metahuman alternative for liveable & flourishing futures
    • Symbiotic/Relational Ethics and other novel axiologies
      • Metahuman justice, freedom, rights, life and wellbeing
      • Towards new metahuman politics.
    • Metahumanist philosophy, aesthetics and politics as opposing transhumanism, and taking further critical posthumanism.
      • Metahuman metaformance aesthetics.
    • The unacknowledged METAHUMAN revolutions:
    • Learning from gatherer cultures: the anthropological revolution of the Original Affluent Society
    • Anarchoprimitivisms and the VegAnarQueerproposal
    • The 1 million population revolution: all estimations show that for 99% of its existence, till around 10,000 years ago, the Sapiens for under 1 million population, a time during which, as said in previous point, quality of life was generally better
      • Voluntary antinanalism, liberation from oppressive reproduction norms, promoting Queer and trans-species kinships.
    • Alternative forms of embodied thinking as movement, and practices to mobilize it.
      • Choral dances as central to human and nonhuman societies
    • Radical Embodied Cognition revolutions.Proprioceprion and BI (Body Intelligence) as shared by all life forms.
    • Learning from nonhumans: their ethical and kinaesthetic superiority – animals as their movement and the crime to immobilise and enslave them
      • learning architecture from animals
    • Evolution as primarily symbiosis and mutual aid, not as struggle. (Kropotkin,Margulis, Haraway). Dismantling the capitalistic fallacies of Neo-Darwinism.
    • The biosphere as mixture and flow, and how our devastating occupation of the earth blocks it.
    • The physics and cosmology revolution. the dynamism of matter.
    • The other revolutions of (mainly) Industrialised (WEIRD) humans:
      • antispeciesist
      • radical ecology
      • Queer, non binary, transfeminism, poliamory, etc.
      • neurodiverse and crip movements
      • indigenous and decolonial movements
    • Metahuman Precursors
      • From Presocratics and Lucretius through Nietzsche to post-Deleuzians and beyond.

 

Suggested Readings:

 

…

METASEXUAL LAB

in Skala Eressou – by Jaym* del Val 28th May 3pm-5pm at Ohana Ranch

https://www.queerranchfestival.com/event-details/metasexual-lab

(Post-)queer sexualities and kinships in the age of extinctions and algorithms

What if all the conceptions around sex that we have inherited are intrinsically wrong? What if sex never had anything to do with reproduction but with collective mutation? How can we reinvent our sexualities and kinships beyond the wrong inherited paradigms? The Lab will propose both a deconstruction of all these inherited conceptions and a reinvention of sex beyond these wrong conceptions: as qualities of experience and as forms of personal and collective mutation that we will redefine beyond all binary categories. This will include a rediscovery of the body’s sensory capacities, through subtle improvisation techniques.

Sex has nothing to do with reproduction, only with mutation, so says the great biologist Lynn Margulis, for whom bacterial sex is the spine of evolution on earth and has given birth to millions of different kind of sex, as a sort of matrix of permanent genetic exchange and mutation (microsex). Similarly Marco Vassi proposed in his 1973 Metasexual Manifesto that there are endless modes of sex that need to be stripped of the miscontrual of sex-as-reproduction. Vassi’s Metasexuality proposed a visionary approach that has been ignored in queer theory circles, which proposes to rethink sex in terms of qualities of experience, and beyond every binary category that has undepinned the misconstrual of sex-as-reproduction.

In the Lab we will explore this possibility to reinvent our experience in searching for deep qualities while deconstructing oppressive binaries, and will invite the participants to diagramme their own experience through the metasexual lense, while considering sex as a force of individual and collective mutation and the most powerful form of symbiosis.

Ultimately metasex/microsex proposes to regain an orgiastic sense of symbiosis with the world that will also be proposed as necessary response to the current ecological crisis and to alienation in algorithmic societies. At the same time it is an invitation to reinvent our kinships beyond a reproductivist heteronormative regime that drives us to extinction through overpopulation, reconsidering queer, polyamorous and even transspecies kinships as new networks of radical care that may heal a disrupted biosphere and counteract supremacist dominion in the climate chaos to come.

 

Conference Information

Hybrid format online + on site

Proposals for papers, workshops, performances/metaformances, exhibition proposals, and book presentations are welcome.

Abstract Submissions: till 21st March 2025 (no extension will be given). Acceptances by 1st April.

Please send to: metabody@metabody.eu

Proposals for workshops and performances/metaformances are welcome.

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Forum Resgistration Fees (with discount due European Project framework)

  • 40 euro (early bird – till 20th April)
  • 60 euro (later – after 20th April)

ONLINE speakers: 30 euros

Bank Information: account for transfer forthcoming, please write to metabody@metabody.eu