Prelude to the Venice Conference
I – Thematic
“As Earth rises from Chaos, Venice rises from the Sea. Venice is the centre of the world. It is ground zero for a potent variant of accumulation, a new epoch of capital. It is where financialization has its origins, it is the seat of powerful dynasties who had immense influence over the formation of the world we live in. Having no land of its own, the origins of Venice is a story of pure negativity, as it has been a place more defined by what it lacked than what it had. Perhaps not since Tenochtitlan has there been a city so disembodied, but unlike Lake Texcoco, encaged in a continental landmass, the Adriatic is an opening.
As the people of Venice fled the attacks of Huns, Lombards and Visigoths, they took refuge on man-made platforms established on swampy marshes which no army could reach. In being pushed out to sea, they are cut off from the Earth, cut off from a body. Was it this loss, this form of castration, which drove desire mad? Aphrodite, goddess of desire, rises from the sea after the Earth castrates the Sky. Capital may not truly emerge anywhere, it may be something transcendental, but the strategies and rituals that so organize its circulation today, which have become its meta, so to speak, are protocols that have sedimented from ideas.
There was already such a concept as ownership and private property, but in Venice, it appears, these ideas were radicalized, abstracted, reimagined and redeployed. In the same way that the way China’s economy appears to be organized in such a way that allows more efficient circulation of capital, with its centralized internal structures inherited from Mao’s reconstruction of the country, Venice’s unique, characteristic disembodiedness allowed private accumulation to take new forms, breaking free of human constraints like kinship, birthright, and so on. Power is also abstracted, lifting up and away from land itself, “what good is land to Venetians?”
Regardless of whether there are any “real secret societies” or not, or whether any “bloodlines” originate from there, to call Venice the center of the world is but to acknowledge that something significant changed, because of the chain of events that felled timber, carved it into piles, and drove them deep into the ground beneath the waters, more than ten million times over. How much desire is required to do such a thing? As I think about people hammering millions of stakes into the ground, the exertion of energy, the sheer willpower. This incredible concentration of desire becomes fixated upon the lack, the great need, for everything, not just a need for ideas to put in books to put in libraries and schools, not just homes and roads, but even the floor itself, must be built.
Venice is a mythological character, as if a titan that rose from the Earth and ascended into the skies. Immense concentrations of desire sedimented as what we now call capital, this abstracted form of power which has lifted away from its attachments to land. Venice understood that power would come from dominating the gaps in between land, the oceans, the airwaves—power lifts upwards, away from nation states, away from governance, into banking, financialization and, now, today, power lies in stochastics, in understanding and utilizing randomness.”
II — Context
Like Ovid, Lucretius, Hesoid and the likes, I seem to start every story with the same introduction, a story about chaotic origins. This is a poetic tradition that recognises that hope rises from suffering, and so, to inspire hope, there must be a palpable sense of suffering. We need to suffer with characters, in order to experience hope through them. The only way to express suffering convincingly is to tell the truth, to earn trust through vulnerability. I cannot invent a new story within which to situate an experience of hope, I can only tell my own story, and I can only try to make it convincing by being as honest as I can. In a sense, there is an exchange: acknowledge my suffering, and have my hope; acknowledge my humanity, and have it reciprocated.
Becoming Press is a project that we started almost five years ago, when we were still living in Nicosia, Cyprus, the small Island nation in the Aegean with a split-identity, nestled under Turkey, not a stone’s throw from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and so on. Our dreams and expectations were aligned with this scale, as jobs and money were scarce. We had been working whatever jobs we could find, working for €4,34/hour in cafes, or €35/night in bars, and occasionally €80 for a DJ gig, or €100 per 12-hour shift on film sets, but during COVID, and the years which followed, even these jobs were drying up. We had been running a free magazine about electronic music culture in Cyprus for many years, and the exceptionally bad circumstances of COVID-19 had us backed into a corner.
We didn’t leave Cyprus because we wanted to, or because we liked Berlin, quite the contrary. Leaving Cyprus broke our hearts. We moved to Berlin with our last money in order to take the minimum wage jobs that were in such short supply back home, but Berlin is a cold city, a city with its back turned, a city of kept gates; even here it took a year to find two stable jobs. All we could do was work, and focus on trying to build a pathway forward. Berlin is a factory with in-house entertainment designed to both pacify workers and reabsorb wages back into the local economy. It is a city that is following the footsteps of London towards post-neoliberal austerity. I found in Germany exactly what I left behind when I left England at 23. A sad way of life: no one should ever have lived here, in this swamp so starved of light. Leaving the Mediterranean was a tragedy, both in 2023, and in 10,000 BC.
The weather is everything, and Berlin has one thing that London doesn’t: hope. The weather is bad, horrendous, actually. It is so bad that you stop expecting it to ever be good, you see the winter ahead as 6 months without the Sun. In this misery, hope thrives; the Sun fights back. Against all odds and expectations, sometimes once per day or more, the Sun breaks through the thick grey clouds, and hits the city like salvation. Berliners stop in place when the sunlight hits them, they turn towards the sun and bask. The city is the same, many miraculous moments appear when you least expect them, just enough that with some effort, you can pull yourself away from the black hole at the centre.
To say that Berlin has its back turned is only half the story. We didn’t know what we wanted. Living in Cyprus had meant that we never bothered to do a book launch before, or any events, for that matter. Our audience was online, and that made life much more simple. It was only in releasing our fourth book that Achim Szepanski suggested we do a launch somewhere in Berlin, but we couldn’t find anywhere to do it. We were two stray cats in dog city, and so we stayed in our lane—we stayed online.
We said “maybe it’s better”, and to this day we maintain the unique pleasure of being able to attend our own events and be unrecognised by the attendees.
It was only when we hit book eight, that all of this would change. We were invited to Lisbon, by Lucas Ferraço Nassif, to meet, to celebrate the book, and to maybe present the book somewhere. He seemed so certain, and his suggestions seemed so pleasant, and it felt so out of nowhere, just like the Berlin sun: "That's actually the best suggestion I’ve heard in years,” Claire said, as if remembering coffee exists, “there is nothing I want more in the world right now than to go to the Mediterranean, have a glass of wine, and talk about Television with friends.” And so, in January 2025, we went to Lisbon, and it was exactly what it needed to be.
Lisbon instilled within us a new confidence, and it wasn’t long until we were thinking about what we could do next. In the early summer, the idea of a conference came up again. An invitation from bruno books in Venice had us thinking about who else we knew in the area. Christian was in Bologna, Alessandro would be in Trieste, friends in Turin, friends near Milan. We had some friends in Ljubljana, and even some friends in Graz. We realised how many of our friends and collaborators had a presence in Italy, how bruno books themselves were one of the first bookstores to dare to stock our books. We realised Venice was at the centre of our world.
There was, however, one more connection between Becoming Press and Venice, one that had been lying dormant for some years. In Cyprus, everyone knows everyone, so knowing people involved in the National Pavilion isn’t quite the same as it would be somewhere else. So we asked them if their space would be available for some readings and some lectures; people do that, right? Activations. The team were incredibly kind, and very hospitable, but there was an on-going situation that we were made aware of. We could use the space, but we should be conscientious of the situation. It was like raving again: “get in, get out, clean up—don’t make me regret this!”. Upon arriving at the Pavilion, we were struck by something immediate that would explain a lot of the confusion in explaining where the meeting would take place. The Cyprus Pavilion is a bit away from everything else, without neighbours, far from the walled gardens, far from the streets surrounding the Arsenale which were so reminiscent of Cyprus. The Venetians conquered Cyprus, they built the walls that enclose the old city in Nicosia. A little bit sad, perhaps, that the pavilion is isolated, but it wouldn’t have been possible any other way.
We visited the other Pavilions, in their grandeur, in their centrality, in their posturing. Impossible, we could never make anything happen in any of these spaces. The Cyprus pavilion is completely unique in that sense, it has its own tempo, its own rhythm, like the Island itself, it has time to be with itself, in its relative isolation. It’s the most brilliant Pavilion, where you really step out of Venice, and into something more real. An empty room, with a single concrete pillar holding up the ceiling, encircled by a crescent stone wall curved around it. An artwork that carries with it a story from the Island. When you need to talk, you create a place to do so. In a way, these artists realised their artwork in our arrival; they made a place to sit and talk, not for us, but as if it were for us. In anticipation of a possibility.
So we met, we came together in Venice to sit and talk. We came together to get to know the people we were collaborating with. We held lectures in the Pavilion, and book presentations in bruno. We were even lucky enough, at a very late stage, to find Casa Punto Croce, a DIY space, to host an edition of Open Secret in their garden area. We literally didn’t have power in our hotel for 4 days during our time in Venice, nor hot water, but we achieved what we went there for. We held our five events, we recorded all of it, and we got to spend time with an amazing group of people.