Lost Time

Time has abandoned us to ourselves. We are stranded in a stagnant present, yet mournful fixations on the past and febrile desires to control the future, continue to linger. Is the historical turning point some are beginning to experience a real or illusory one? Is there something latent in our present that will resocialise us with the good historical company we used to savour (however ambivalently)? Or rather – with the impotence of a coarse social climber – is our yearning for historical significance, a barrier in and of itself?

Fears and hopes are often one and the same: whether it be ghosts of the past or technological deterministic futures. However, while managed decline and mass exodus of the institutions haunt the zeitgeist, time regained may still be still far from us.

A series of events at Verdurin in Spring and Summer of 2025 considers the question of lost time, subjecting progress, ideas of exit and return, and even history itself to a contest of ideas and realities.

Progressive Agendas

The idea of progress, one of the animating concepts of Western civilisation, permeates our understanding of history and shapes the way we imagine the future. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today’s identity politics, progress offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance that things can get better and a justification for our desires.

Wednesday, 25 June, 7pm

Dogs That Don’t Bark

How are architectural visualisation of the future – from anglofuturist progress to ecological utopia – shaping the thing itself? Architecture critic Tim Abrahams considers the ideological and material ends of aesthetics.

Wednesday, 11 June, 7pm

Leaving Las Vegas

What does it mean to abandon social formations like the contemporary art world? What if the artist’s only way out of the art world is through art? Writer and artist Alexander Adams in conversation.

Wednesday, 28 May

Zeitgeist

How do humanity’s great abstractions function over time? This course on the philosophy of history considers the subject in chaos, stasis, progress, and providence. Nina Power leads this four-part course.

22 April – 3 June

Accelerationist Society and its Future

If we don’t control our present, is it too late to shape our future? Novelist and author of For Emma Ewan Morrison in conversation with Nicholas Blincoe.

Wednesday, 9 April