Lecture at Trust, Berlin

18 Dec., 2025

Lecturing on the “Uninsurable Futures: The Politics of Anticipation” at Trust in Berlin on 18 Dec. at 19:30 (CET), also livestreaming on their Twitch Channel.

Trust invites theorist, artist, and designer Patricia Reed to revisit some of the theoretical work she developed around finance, anticipation, and futurity over the past decade. Her 2018 text « Optimist Realism: Finance and the Politicization of Anticipation » explored how finance captured the future through derivatives and credit, operationalizing what hadn’t yet happened to reshape the present. She’ll revisit Suhail Malik’s « Surfeit Futurity, » (2021) which argued we face not a cancellation of the future but an overwhelming excess of it. More futurity than our present capacities can order or give meaning to.

How do these frameworks hold up against current conditions? Does hyperstition—fictions that make themselves real—still describe what’s happening when certain futures are no longer speculative gambles, but too likely to insure? This is less a presentation than an attempt to think together through shifting ground.