Socialist Anthropocene: Artistic Perspectives on the Great Transformation of Nature

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?

About the speakers:

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015) and a special issue of Third Text entitled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianism at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their Horizon Europe project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant. See: www.translocal.org

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