Wednesday, January 21st, 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
To close the Nosymmetries 2025-26 programme, writer and cultural theorist Ana Teixeira Pinto has been invited to give a workshop and a public talk, sharing her line of research in recent years.
In post-apocalyptic fiction, collapsing societies often fracture into two groups: the hunters and the hunted. Popularised by films such as Mad Max, this genre presents a world in which civilisation ends, but masculinity endures—the very ideology that catalysed the collapse of civilisation, outlives it. This is a masculinity portrayed as monstrous, yet one that is also understood as society’s logical and inevitable product.
But the end of the world is not just a story about scavenging, social breakdown, and human nature under extreme duress. Apocalypse is opportunity: catastrophe liberates masculinity from social constraints, which is why, to quote David Brim, “many post-holocaust novels are little-boy wish fantasies about running amok in a world without rules”. This is where Silicon Valley comes in, with its vision of new worlds, transcending and overcoming the current one. A similar dialectic to the one shrouding masculinity in post-apocalyptic fiction now surrounds artificial intelligence, with LLM described as both predator and protector. These are not just eccentricities — they are symptoms of a techno-masculinist ideology, one that blends the hacker ethos with a prepper mindset, lionises disruption, and dreams of an elite untethered from democracy, equity, and embodied limitations. Hence the lack of interest in institutional or brand legacy one finds in tech circles. It signals the belief that the present has no related future. Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw is an emblem for this type of revolutionary energy without a clear political content, defined solely by the idea that violence births the sublime.
Ana Teixeira Pinto is a professor at the Braunschweig University of the Arts. Her writings have been included in publications such as Third Text, Afterall, e-flux journal, Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of a series of books on the anti-political turn published by Sternberg Press. Together with Kader Attia and Anselm Franke, she organised the lectures and podcast series The White West: Whose Universal, which took place at HKW Berlin. She was also a member of the artistic team at the Berlin Biennale 2022.
