What the Greeks considered of little value, a necessary toil towards the time of leisure and life, became the supreme value, while everything that ontologically opposed or contrasted it, and life itself, has been absorbed or diverted. This shift in values could explain the traumatic passage from studies to labour, from the exaltation of the blessed frivolity of youth as opposed to the perpetual struggling of adultness (that finds its sole reward in the satisfaction of laying the groundwork for the perpetuation of a system by one's own progeny). In a certain way, we are perpetually thrown out of School, as humanity is eternally thrown out of Eden. Or, maybe, we were never kicked out, but school, and paradise as well, have been turned into something else: the universal factory.

This process reflects the shift that occurred in the relationship between two categories that the Greeks used to define human activity: poiesis (from Poiein) and praxis (from Prattein). If the first means to produce, in the sense of bringing something from non-being into being, or in the sense of bringing something from darkness to light, the second one indicates the will that directly translates into a concrete action that will culminate in an immediate effect. Throughout History, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben remarked, these two categories have merged. The consequences of this coalescence is the elevation of praxis (what we can define as labour) to the rank of the highest human activity, and the relegation of poiesis (creating something that was not existing before and that does not serve any human biological necessity) to a purely intellectual and abstract contemplation.

According to this scenario, the whole range of human endeavours is destined to become laborious: every action, from cutting down a tree to making love or a piece of art, is urged to produce an immediate, quantifiable, result.

This is here. On the verge of an indiscernible end. This is eventually where Art becomes a territory to reclaim, a territory infused with poiesis, a place where a faith persists in the way things and ideas manifest themselves through the uncanny, the unquantifiable, devoid of the necessity of efficiency. The time of Art is secret, sacrificed, would say Georges Bataille, as this time and these energies are constantly stolen from labour.

The School of the End of Time was founded by Ambra Pittoni, Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti as a quasi-educational and performative platform aiming at exploring new ways of inhabiting knowledge, at preserving the capacity of art to produce a scholaic time and space, to exist as the realm of the undomesticated human agency. "The End of Time" is the joyful moment in which the several domains of existence collapse one into the other, producing a foreign territory where the relationship between history and man, consciousness and mystery can be renewed.

The School of the End of Time aims at building the stage and circumstances within which the event of knowledge can take place and be embodied. It will do so through the programming of collective activities and experiences devoted to disable the notion of time as productive, and focusing on the nourishment and activation of a specific form of attention and posture. The programme will borrow approaches and techniques from somatic practices, fringe sciences, minor literature, automatic writing and forgotten practices and knowledge. By nature, the activities of The School of the End of Time tend to be formatted in a performative framework, a temporary set in which the tools and roles developed by dramaturgy and theatre can situate knowledge in a specific, exuberant act, through a non-hierarchical approach between theoretical learning and artistic research.

The School of the End of Time aims at becoming a long-term project, a living organism, a nomadic institution composed of an ever-changing community of researchers and practitioners.

Ambra Pittoni, Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti

Recent projects include Umlaut. The public programme for contemporary visual arts (together with Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Luigi Fassi); Why Is Everybody Being So Nice?, De Appel, Amsterdam; Goodbye, See You After the Revolution!, UvA, Amsterdam; Dear Betty: Run Fast, Bite Hard, GAMeC, Bergamo. In 2017 she co-founded The School of the End of Time with Ambra Pittoni and Paul-Flavien Enriquez-Sarano. Her writing has appeared in contemporary art and culture magazines such as Not (Nero on Theory), Flash Art, L'Officiel Art, KABUL Magazine.