Monday 16 October 2023
6-7.30pm
The Vital Breath from the Broken Earth: Sensing and Healing on China’s Fossil Fuel Frontier
Performative lecture by Mia Yu (Beijing-based art historian, curator and educator) introduced by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (SAVA / UCL Postsocialist Art Centre).

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.

Tuesday 17 October
5-7pm
Revolutionary Metallurgy I

Deborah Tchoudjinoff (University of the Arts)
Baigala I: A convergence of art and technology through sculpture, virtual reality realities in reflecting on extractivism
This presentation will share the thinking and process behind the artwork produced for Five Heads (Tavan Tolgoi): Art, Anthropology, and Mongol Futurism in 2018, a group exhibition featuring 5 anthropologists specialising in Mongolia, and 5 artists responding to the research. Working closely with Dr. Lauren Bonilla, Baigala I developed through following her extensive research on extractive atmospheres into western Mongolia. The sculptures were made to reference horse saddles as a poignant reminder of what is at stake. The virtual reality component bring viewers into significant terrains and landscapes of western Mongolia. Merging physical artistry with a digital experience, Baigala I asks that a deeper understanding of the delicate balance between change and resilience is needed.

Rebecca Empson (UCL Anthropocene)
Extracting Minerals and Ambiguous Borders: profit-making strategies in Mongolia
When coal is mined in Mongolia by state-owned companies and sold to China for a profit, it is often viewed as good for the Nation and something everyone can benefit from. People were given shares in the company as a portion of anticipated gains, but over the years scandals have surrounded this extractive industry. In one case the border between Mongolia and China was deliberately made opaque to allow for coal to be sold at two different prices, generating a share for those who ran the company. In this and many other instances, resource to cash schemes abound as a way for politicians to appease the electorate and do business with each other.

Revolutionary Metallurgy II: Victoria Donovan (University of St. Andrews)
The Making and Unmaking of Black Myth of Donbas
In the first part of this talk she will engage Asia Bazdyrieva’s idea of the “resourcification of Ukraine” to examine how the Ukrainian East, also known as Donbas, was reduced in the colonial visual imaginary – through maps, corporate advertising, and industrial photography – to a space of extraction and economic exploitation. In the second part, she will examine how creative and curatorial practice from the region in the post-2014 period has challenged these visual politics. Drawing on decolonial thinking, she asks how those with situated knowledge of the region’s multiple realities have broken with resourcifying epistemic practices, “thinking and doing differently.”

Linda Kaljundi (University of Tallinn)
Estonian Donbass, Ruhr, and whatnot – oil shale and transnational imageries of petroculture
The expansion of the Estonian oil shale industry and mining is closely linked to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. During the 1930s, the oil shale industry was booming largely thanks to the commissions coming from Nazi Germany. In the 1940s, the Soviets invested heavily in Estonian oil shale in order to produce gas for war-torn Leningrad. Although often represented as Estonian own super technology, the economically vulnerable oil shale industry is heavily dependent on global flows and the availability of fossil fuels. Cultural imaginaries of the oil shale industry and the infrastructures around it have been equally transnational. Influenced by the Western European, North American, and Soviet visions of industry and extractivism, they reveal well the intense cultural transfers shaping the face of global industrial modernity. This talk will primarily focus on visual representations of the oil shale from the Soviet period and their wider context in the Soviet visual culture, but it also touches upon the impact of transnational and interwar period imaginaries.

Wednesday 18 October 2023
5-7pm
Ecosocialist Epistemologies

Weronika Parfianowicz (Institute of Polish Culture in Warsaw)
Mapping discussions on ecological crisis in socialist Poland
The discussion on the global ecological crisis in Poland challenges the stereotype of socialist states’ public sphere as a monolith where only non-substantial conflicts could be displayed. Beginning with the 1970’s environmental problems on global and regional scale became an important topic of debates among experts milieus as well as the lay audience. Different approaches and perspectives on environmental issues were circulating and competing in public discourse, influencing public opinion and states’ environmental policies. In my presentation I’ll focus on some of the most interesting examples of this debate: works of scientists collaborating with The Committee of Research and Prognosis “Poland 2000” and popular science magazine “Aura”.

Alex Petrusek (SAVA Research Fellow)
Towards a Socialist Anthropocene: Debating Degrowth in East Germany, 1972-1989
Contemporary scholarship often emphasizes degrowth’s capitalism-based intellectual genealogy, omitting significant contributions from activists from socialist societies. Following the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, East German ecosocialists and Christians debated slow-, zero-, and degrowth concepts and practices throughout the 1970s and 1980s, presenting alternatives to growth from within socialism. Ecosocialists like Wolfgang Harich and Rudolf Bahro published systemic theories of slow- or zero-growth to address the ecological crisis, with Bahro emphasizing spiritual rather than economic growth as key to humanity’s future. Simultaneously, researchers based in the Ecclesiastical Research Center in Wittenburg, funded by the East German Protestant Church, turned to voluntary simplicity based in Christian ethics, and petitioned the party-state to reverse its growth-first policies. Together, these ecosocialist and eco-Christian perspectives offer unique criticisms of, and solutions to, the most destructive practices driving the Anthropocene.

Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu (philosopher, translator and culture theorist)
Seen from Romania: On the Ecological Socialism of the Future
A common tenet of anticommunist historiography that has been adopted by large segments of Western critical theory holds that “no significant contributions to Marxism” and no theories and practices that might be relevant to our present have been developed in the experience of East European real socialism, and in particular during Romania’s totalitarian regime. My research shows that such assumptions are more ideological than factual, owing more to the biases of the coloniality of knowledge and to the influence of the post-socialist colonization than to the truth. Already from the mid-1960s, the Socialist Bloc was having intense debates on the future of socialism and on the possible socialist future of the planet. Several proposals for systemic alternatives have been advanced. The paths were different, but the consensus was that the socialism of the future had to be ecological. In Romania, major steps have been taken also in practice to prepare for the change towards an ecological socialism, which implied the transformation of the entire socioeconomy (not only of the “mode of production”). Meanwhile, the internal transfer of generations taking place in the 1970s gave a pervading ecological dimension to the entire cultural sphere. Drawing from research into the unjustly forgotten Romanian socialist library, as well as from an autoethnography of my upbringing in an experimental workers neighborhood from the city of Cluj, I will bring to evidence a few important elements from the historical development of ecological socialism, the outlines of the projected socialist river-based economy in Romania, and its contemporary relevance and obstacles.