Training for the Future is a utopian training camp where audiences become trainees to exercise in alternative futures. The 2022 edition, titled We Demand a Million More Years, focussed on chronopolitics: the politics of time in a moment we are out of time. Artists, philosophers, activists as well as non-human presences led trainings on time travel, deep listening, radical slowness, the subconscious present and plant based time to reclaim the means of production of our future.

The constructive elements of the training camp itself carried different temporal marks, all interconnected: ammonite fossils, a family of octopus and squid that went extinct in the 5th mass extinction 66 million years ago; defunct synthetic tires, that stand for an industry and an economic boom—the so-called “Italian miracle”—and its subsequent crisis that is a recent archeology of the larger Turin region; and finally hardened oil, the fossil inheritance whose combustion fuels the destruction of common futures. Assembled in sculptural configurations and functional training support systems, these elements together give shape to a chronopolitical arena, in which the living worlds stored in fossils are conceived not only as witnesses, but as trainers in their own right: no one can teach you what a million more years is, but a million years itself.

The 2022 Training for the Future program consisted of: Wherever it is, it’s here and now by Diana Anselmo & Giuseppe Comuniello (Al.Di.Qua.); Game of Choice by Viviana Druga (Tarot de Berlin); Moving time-times by MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr); Telling Stories by Sista Oloruntoyin (ARRiVATi) & Mwayemudza Ndindah (Black Coalition for Justice and Self-Defense); Listening to Nonhumans (Heard and Unheard) by Kite and Robbie Wing; Consensual Dismantling of Normativity by Egle Oddo; Planetary Politics by Lorenzo Marsili (Rizoma); Lower your shields and surrender your ships! by Charl Landvreugd.