SAVA: The Vital Breath from the Broken Earth - Sensing and Healing on China’s Fossil Fuel Frontier

In this performance lecture, Mia Yu re-imagines the anthropogenic landscape of Fushun colliery—Asia’s largest open-pit mine—as a cultural-material construction of modernity, where Chinese cosmology, colonial violence, Socialist industrialization, hybrid forms of shamanism and personal memories converged and agglomerated throughout the 20th century. Approaching the gigantic mine pit, the heaps of mining waste, the depleted rivers and the latest renewable energy projects as “strati-fictions”, Mia Yu narrates the non-linear stories of Fushun with rich historical materials, found archives, film footage and field recordings. Through a variety of mediums and technologies, Mia Yu and local artists set out to activate the “vital breath” from the geologically-and-chemically-altered earth while exploring an ethics of healing and care on the fossil fuel frontier of Northeast China.  

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. www.sava.earth