SAVA Research Week // Holistic Socialisms I: Holistic Sciences

This panel will consider holistic approaches to the environment under socialism, manifest in the systemic thinking and praxes of socialist environmental planning in complex relation to ecological questions arising from socialist development. Yi Gu (University of Toronto) will give a presentation on the "Countryside on Display: Mao’s Data Visualization and China’s Agricultural Campaigns" and Viktor Pál (University of Ostrava, Czechia) will give a presentation on socialist environmental holism and Hungary. The panel presentations will be followed by responses by Diana Kudaibergenova (SSEES) and Jan Burek (SAVA UCL). 

ABSTRACTS

Yi Gu: "Countryside on Display: Mao’s Data Visualization and China’s Agricultural Campaigns"
This presentation highlights a genealogy of data-driven management in China's countryside, linking the contemporary Digital Countryside campaign, launched in 2018, to a lesser-known, similar initiative during Mao's era, albeit analog rather than digital. In both instances, data—both numerical and spatial, often with questionable accuracy—were not only used to make soil, water, plants, and animals more legible and thus more extractable but were also transformed into spectacles. Studying the affective impact of data visualization during Mao's era illuminates the mechanics of mobilization behind two of the most significant anthropogenic changes to nature, shaping not only the socialist countryside but also contemporary China, under the rhetoric of ecological civilization.

Viktor Pál: "Socialist Environmental Holism and Hungary"
New research in environmental issues suggests that the state-socialist countries of Eastern Europe had their own unique approach to the environment. Researchers who study countries like Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and the Soviet Union have reassessed the negative environmental record of these countries and are now focusing on a more complex shared trait to understand the unique socialist approach to the environment that aimed to renegotiate the complex relationships between the social wellbeing of humans and the environment, between “progress” and conservation, between ideology and reality. Despite in many state-socialist countries, including socialist Hungary, experts and politicians pushed for a "holistic" approach that tried to balance the economy and the environment while taking into account how complexly nature and society were linked; the scientifically interested public is not much aware of such narratives, and social memory is linked to the environmental catastrophes, such as the Chernobyl disaster, caused by communism. This talk aims not to conquest the dark environmental record of socialism in Eastern Europe; rather, it looks at how the Soviets and Hungarians tried to make people's relationships with nature more harmonious, with an understanding they had failed their quest. The socialists’ struggle and failure may teach our contemporary societies about a version of the future that may await us. 

Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) is a visual arts led interdisciplinary research project that challenges the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene by asserting the constitutive role of the environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. Led by Dr. Maja Fowkes at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, the project was selected for a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) and is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Image: Rein Tammik, Landscape with Greenhouses, 1980. Installation shot from the exhibition ‘Art in the Age of the Anthropocene,’ KUMU Tallinn, September 2023.