Novo Pan Klub will bring theorists and artists from different fields together to consider a contemporary crisis of imagination. The program will reanimate Argentinian artist Xul Solar’s Pan Klub. This “universal club,” initiated in 1939 in Buenos Aires, was conceived as a “collective seánce” of minds and ludic ideas. The Pan Klub emerged from Solar's expansive intellectual undertakings, which were guided by a coded pattern of reconfiguration, revision, and rupture. Solar’s paintings, languages, games, and utopian futures represent the artist’s continuous search for the frontier of reality, and it is in the spirit of this pursuit—not the deciphering of his visions—with which the Novo Pan Klub engages. Over the course of three weeks, the program will serve as an epistemic and political space from which new tools for the creation of meaning may emerge. The sessions in this edition will be led by contributors from diverse fields of knowledge and praxis, including Black studies, Indigenous worldviews, queer and feminist practices, critical and philosophical computation, design, and environmental justice.

This call to awaken the collective imagination of the Pan Klub comes at a moment in which even the predictive and generative capacities of images and discourses seem to foreclose any way out of contemporary regimes of oppression. In addition, while the contemporary power of computation allows for the construction and distribution of innumerable simulations that offer convenient ways to perceive the world, these programs and systems only respond to their own design and training logics. The feedback tightening loop between media, knowledge, lived experience, and the environment, moreover, is not merely a concern for today. The future is trapped in an endless financialized exchange with the present; a loop that all but guarantees that the inequality, detention, and violence enacted upon racialized and marginalized bodies will endure. In considering the representational, structural, and technical problems posed by economic precarity, climate emergencies, racial injustice, and algorithmic dominance—to name only a few—Novo Pan Klub works toward collectively conjuring insurrectionary and perhaps even emancipatory language and imaginaries. The demand for new paradigms is particularly pronounced in Mexico, where a significant political transition has taken place and flows of power are not easily extractable from corruption and organized crime. With these landscapes in mind, Novo Pan Klub participants will consider with which knowledges and networks art and technology must begin to collaborate in order to force open new future-presents. The program intends to realize—and not only to serve as—a bridge between the world in front of us and those which remain unseen, occult, and yet to emerge.