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SAVA Research Week V: Geotransformación / Panel on Arboreal Politics
19 March 2025, 4:00 pm–5:30 pm
Panel discussion organized within the framework of the SAVA Research Week V on Geotransformación: Southerning the Socialist Anthropocene with Oto Hudec (artist, Košice), Lucie Česálková (Charles University, Prague), and responses from Jakub Beneš (SSEES UCL) and Makar Tereshin (SAVA UCL).
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Maja and Reuben Fowkes
This panel discussion considers the politics of trees in Central Europe and beyond, illuminating official attitudes to forests under socialism and the predicament of trees in the era of climate breakdown. With presentations by artist Oto Hudec, who represented Slovakia at the 2024 Venice Biennial with his project Floating Arboretum, and by film studies scholar Lucie Česálková on spruce monocultures in socialist science documentaries, followed by responses from historian of peasant rebellions Jakub Beneš and SAVA researcher on utopian socialist agriculture Makar Tereshin.
Sailing towards the Foretold Arboretums
Oto Hudec (artist, Košice)
On a trajectory through several art projects related to climate change and environment, the presentation will navigate towards the stories of protests where people and trees defended a common interest - to preserve the forest, a tree, a natural area, an ecosystem that we are part of. Trees, as organisms do not exist as solitary units, are connected with the soil, microorganisms, and other plants. Maybe right now, especially in a fragile political atmosphere, we can learn from this natural collaboration and from the strategies of tree protests, how to organize, work together, and survive.
Time-Lapse Sensitivity and Deep Growth of Czechoslovak Natural Science Film
Lucie Česálková (Charles University, Prague)
The prevalence of spruce monocultures in Czechoslovakia is usually associated with the socialist era, although the origins of this practice date back to the time of Maria Theresa (late 18th century). Jan Calábek's film Starý smrk vypravuje (Old Spruce Narrates) was made in 1947 and was repeatedly screened as an exemplary popular-scientific film throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As a time-lapse film, it seeks to share a sensibility of the tree and, perhaps surprisingly, criticizes monoculture management. The cinematic method of accelerating very slow movements thus becomes here a means of thinking about the deep time of growth and long dureé of agricultural and cultural policies and their representations.
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: Oto Hudec, Floating Arboretum, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
About the Speakers
Lucie Česálková
Film historian at Charles University, Prague
Lucie Česálková is a Czech film historian based at the Department of Film Studies at Charles University in Prague. She is also the editor-in-chief of the academic journal Iluminace, published by the National Film Archive, Prague. In her research, she focuses on the history of nonfiction cinema, specifically its educational, promotional or instructional variants, on the history of noncommercial film exhibition and moviegoing. Česálková has been publishing articles in such journals as Film History, Memory Studies, The Moving Image, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, and others, as well as many book chapters in edited volumes. Recently, she co-edited a volume Non-Fiction Cinema in Postwar Europe. Visual Culture and the Reconstruction of Public Space (eds. Lucie Česálková, Johannes Preatorius-Rhein, Perrine Val, Paolo Villa, AUP 2024). Her current project focuses on the visual regimes of coal, water, oil, natural gas and nuclear power, its surrounding narratives and imagery in state-socialist Czechoslovakia. Engaging the environmental and energy humanities perspective, she analyses the ways nature was framed as a resource specifically in Czech industrial and agricultural film. She is a member of the research group Environmental Humanities Prague, and together with Christian Ferencz-Flatz she co-leads an international research group Socialist and Post-Socialist Useful Film.
Oto Hudec
Visual artist
Oto Hudec is a Slovak visual artist who creates videos, murals, animations, sculptures and works for public spaces about the climate crisis, immigration, refugees and the environmental impacts of globalization. His work on climate change is intertwined with activism. He also collaborates on projects with children and youth from disadvantaged communities. In 2024, in collaboration with a wider artistic team, he created the Floating Arboretum project as the Slovak representation at the Venice Biennale. He is a teacher at the Faculty of Arts TUKE, Slovakia. He lives and works in Košice, Slovakia.
Jakub Beneš
Associate Professor at UCL SSEES
Jakub Beneš is Associate Professor in Central European History at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He is also the author of the award-winning Workers and Nationalism: Czech and German Social Democracy in Habsburg Austria, 1890-1918 (Oxford, 2017) and The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025).
Makar Tereshin
Social anthropologist, documentary photographer at SAVA
Makar Tereshin is a social anthropologist and documentary photographer. He is a SAVA Research Fellow at PACT, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. As part of SAVA, Makar will investigate how nuclear energy, water management, and botanical experiments converged in a desert city of Aqtau, Kazakhstan.