A keynote lecture by Maja and Reuben Fowkes at the V&A Conference Fluid Futures: Recalibrating Land and History in Global Eastern Europe

29 November 2025, V&A South Kensington

Afterlives of Utopia: Ecocentric Lens on the Socialist Anthropocene
This presentation considers the ways in which contemporary artists are revisiting the environmental histories of socialism to cast an ecocritical light on its utopian project of world-making transformation. What can we learn from art practices about the multiple collisions between socialist developmentalism and the ecological balance of the natural world, how were the progressive agendas of the Socialist Anthropocene underpinned by the ethos and mechanisms of socialist extractivism and what are the implications for the understanding of today’s Eastern Europe and the planetary stakes of climate breakdown?