Jonas Staal: 94 Million Years of Collectivism Event

Join us on the 13th for a guest lecture and screening of 94 Million Years of Collectivism by artist Jonas Staal for the first SAVA Research Week, with responses by John Sabapathy and Anna Barcz. Moderated by Dr. Maja and Reuben Fowkes: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/events/2023/mar/jonas-staal-94-million-years-collectivism

Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) sets out to radically transform current critical debates around the Anthropocene, addressing the major lacuna in existing accounts by establishing the Socialist Anthropocene as a conceptual framework that asserts the constitutive role of the environmental histories and potentialities of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. The project is led by Dr. Maja Fowkes (UCL Institute of Advanced Studies) and funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee.

Image: Jonas Staal, 94 Million Years of Collectivism (2022). Courtesy the artist.

The inaugural Research Week of Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts began on March 13th, 2023. Artists, researchers and scholars with cross-disciplinary approaches presented their work in both public events and closed discussions. We thank all those who joined us and made this a productive and thought-provoking research week!

We are pleased to announce our podcast ‘Left to be Desired’ is now live. In episode 1 of Left to be Desired, Maja and Reuben Fowkes talk to Austrian artist Oliver Ressler about his recent work around extractivism and explore connections with socialist geographies.

Left to be Desired is available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and Audacy. You can also access it via the podcast website: https://lefttobedesired.libsyn.com/site

Left to be Desired podcast explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global Socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes will invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Since 2019 Ressler directs Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund, that lead to an exhibition at Camera Austria in Graz in September 2021. Barricading the Ice Sheets is currently on view at The Showroom

Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) is the first large-scale interdisciplinary research project that institutes the Socialist Anthropocene as a new field of study within the critical corpus concerned with challenging and decentring the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene, asserting the constitutive role of the twentieth century environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. It is led by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, who are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.

This podcast is edited by Sammara Abbasi.

Socialist Anthropocene: Artistic Perspectives on the Great Transformation of Nature

Co-Directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) Maja and Reuben Fowkes to give a guest lecture on the Socialist Anthropocene at the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL), University of Applied Arts Vienna on 23 March 2023, 6pm.

The Socialist Anthropocene denotes the version of the Anthropocene that unfolded on the socialist side of the Cold War divide, the particular histories of which have been side-lined in the west-centric and universalizing narrative of the new geological age. Its entwined social and environmental histories are illuminated in the art and visual culture of the socialist world, not least in depictions of the vast project of infrastructural, agricultural and geoengineered interventions into the natural environment decreed in the Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature of 1948. This presentation will consider the distinctiveness of the Socialist Anthropocene, including outlining the tension between the modernizing and colonizing tendencies of socialist transformation, especially in relation to the histories of expansion into the indigenous territories of the Soviet North and South. Furthermore, it will address the alternative epistemologies of socialist science, grounded in the understanding of the Earth as an interconnected ecological system and manifest in Soviet advances in climate science since the 1960s. To what extent can then the Socialist Anthropocene be approached as a potential source of ecological models and practices to confront the planetary crisis of climate change?

Image Used: Saule Suleimenova, One Steppe Forward, 2019. Courtesy the artist.