The SAVA Conference on the Great Transformation of Nature examines the multiscalar processes that shaped socialist paths through the Anthropocene as figured in visions of extractivism, developmentalism, terraforming and monoculturalization. Across the differentiated terrains and plural temporalities of global socialism, it brings together scholarly and artistic unearthings of its contested praxes to unravel domineering infrastructures and assess the vitality of ecosocialist and biocultural insurgencies.

ABSTRACTS

PANEL I: EXTRACTIVIST FRONTS

Jakub Gawkowski (CEU Vienna)
Temporalities of Coal Mining in 1950s Upper Silesia

This presentation investigates artistic portrayals of coal mining in 1950s Polish Upper Silesia, examining the diverse temporal perspectives evoked by these visual representations. Despite the extractivist mining policies of Polish authorities during Stalinism, aimed at modernization through coal exploitation, mining emerges as a complex socio-cultural practice generating multiple, often conflicting temporal narratives. The study highlights regional artists’ practices to refine our understanding of their artistic and political positioning amidst individual, state, and environmental dynamics. Focusing on the period between 1953 and 1956 when Katowice was dubbed Stalinogród, and the subsequent artistic freedoms during de-Stalinization, it analyzes how socialist realist depictions of coal miners projected visions of collective emancipation and national prosperity. Contrasting these with the idiosyncratic approach of Grupa Janowska, a mining association of amateur painters inspired by occultism, the presentation centers on Teofil Ociepka’s work. Ociepka, an amateur self-taught artist and theosopher who mined at Giesche’s mine in Katowice, received official support while promoting unorthodox spiritual beliefs, blending the reality of Silesian miners with imagined flora and fauna representing not only pre-industrial, but pre-modern unity of nature and human being. Through this case-study, it elucidates the multiplicity of temporalities entwined with extractive industries, where past, present, and future narratives intersect.

Nikolay Erofeev  (University of Kassel)
Extractive Assistance: Copper Mining, Socialist Development and Urban Planning in Cold-War Mongolia

Extraction of natural resources was the foremost priority in the vision of Soviet industrialization. Development in remote regions, the establishment of new cities in the Far North and Central Asia aimed to explore resources in an economically viable manner. The international dimension of this endeavour is often overlooked. The burgeoning literature on ‘socialist globalisation’ discussed countless cases of material and immaterial encounters between actors from Eastern Europe and the Global South, often taking seriously claims of Soviet propaganda about anti-imperialists, “Friendship of People” and socialist solidarity. This paper, instead, proposes examining socialist development assistance through mineral resource extraction, revealing more pragmatic motives of East-South cooperation. Focusing on the case-study of Erdenet mining-processing plant, developed with the assistance of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, for the extraction of copper in 1976, this paper uncovers extensive extractive infrastructure in Mongolia – an expanding constellation of towns, storage and transportation centres, logistic and power infrastructure centred around the goal of extraction of copper. Erdenet, a multilateral project developed collaboratively by socialist countries, exposes grim motives beneath the claims about the international “Friendship of People”. Arguable, it was extraction that drove Soviet leaders’ ambition to integrate Eastern Europe with the Global South. While raw materials fell under Western embargo, the Soviet Bloc had to establish own markets for resources, exploiting former colonies in the Global South in the interests of the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

Bogna Stefańska & Jakub Depczyński (Museum of Modern Art Warsaw)
Socialist Extractivist Pasts and Postanthropocene Futures in Poland: On Ecological Art and Postartistic Practices in Opolno-Zdrój

In the paper we explore socialist extractivism in Poland and its long-lasting legacies and consequences, as they are experienced in a specific place: Opolno-Zdój, a former spa town located at the edge of the infamous “Turów” open-pit lignite mine and powerplant. Our investigation is guided by artists’ engagement with the town – the pioneering eco-art gathering “The Land of Zgorzelec: Science and Art in Defense of Natural Environment of Man” convened there in 1971 by leading Polish conceptual artists of the time, and contemporary transdisciplinary assemblies that take inspiration from the historical event to engage in current debates on climate crisis, Anthropocene and just transition. In the first part of the paper we explore the 1971 gathering, highlighting its participants critical approach to socialist extractivism and modernization paradigm. Instead of producing material artworks, they focused on discussion, exploration of landscape and using art to build relationships with the environment, raising issues such as overproduction, overconsumption and critique of development and technical advancement. In the second part we take a situated position and focus on assemblies that we have co-organized in Opolno-Zdrój since 2021. We show how contemporary artists and activist revisit the 1971 formula to demodernize it and work with the local community, that struggles with consequences of decades of extractivist slow violence. We ground our approach in the theories of postartistic practices and usology, mobilizing art to speculate, imagine and bring to life a vision of a better future for the town built on the ruins of the socialist Anthropocene.

Hana Janečková (Academy of Fine Arts Prague)
Conservation, Care and Identification: Animal Extraction from Countries of Global South in Eva Koťátková’s The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter

Lenka the giraffe was captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to Prague Zoo to become the very first Czechoslovak giraffe. She survived only two years in captivity, after which her body was donated to the National Museum in Prague where it was exhibited until 2000. The paper will examine Lenka’s life and death – contextualizing it within the history of Czechoslovak of animal acquisition from the countries of the Global South – which is the subject of artist Eva Koťátková’s ongoing research towards her collaborative project for 60th Venice Biennale: The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter. Tracing records of an animal acquisition through historical material gathered from the archives of National Film Archive, National Museum and Prague Zoo, the paper will argue that while the desire to collect and own nature, animals and artefacts – even in the name of science – is an example of the violent subjugation of nature in colonial modernity, such an extraction of nature was unquestioned in the socialist policies and practices of animal acquisition. Using Andrew Baldwin’s concept of ‘anthropocene mobilities’, this paper will establish the complexities of socialism’s rejection and identification with the colonial project in East Africa by examining sources from socialist popular culture, and the practice and politics of scientific projects of animal conservation. It will discuss how and to what extent contemporary decolonial and ecological perspectives are articulated in Koťátková’s work with the visibility and erasure of such recent histories – especially the notion of how transformative pedagogy can play a part in reparation and restoration.

PANEL II: INDUSTRIAL TEMPORALITIES

Marija Drėmaitė (Vilnius University)
Dream Factories: Visualizing the High Industrial Period in the Baltic States

The talk is based on a critical review of the exhibition Dream Factories? Industry and Modernism in the Nordic and Baltic countries 1945–1990 which was prepared by seven industrial heritage museums in the seven Baltic Sea countries (2007–2010). The aim behind the comparative analysis was the goals and representations of ‘high industrial period’ (concept by economic historian Maths Isacsson) in two different societal models, developed in the Nordic and Baltic countries after World War II: the Nordic social democratic welfare states (Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland), and the occupied Baltic Socialist Soviet Republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, commonly known as the Pribaltika region of the USSR). In spite of their ideological differences and national diversities, the countries on both sides of the Baltic Sea implemented radical industrialisation and modernization strategies. Despite the strikingly similar models and rhetoric concerning the discourse with industry as forming an ideal for the rest of society, discussion on differences (and how these can be traced) has become the main research question, especially defining the socialist industrialisation in the Baltic States.
Based on these findings the further critical analysis explores two cases – Elektrėnai (celebrated mono-industrial town of the power plant, 1960-1964) and Juknaičiai (an architectural award winning kolkhoz, 1964-1988) – and their visual representations in the context of the socialist Anthropocene.

Victoria Donovan (University of St. Andrews)
Resisting ‘Resourcification’: Artist Engagement with Industrial Heritage as Resistance to Soviet and Russian (Re-)Colonial Epistemic Violence

If as Achille Mbembe reminds us archives are infrastructures of colonial epistemic violence, Soviet industrial archives in Ukraine deal in specialist kinds of epistemic imperialism. Doubling as the dominant institutions of memory in many eastern Ukrainian ‘monotowns,’ industrial archives, and the celebratory words and images of extractivist practice they contain, manifest as the institutionalised and thus ‘authoritative’ meaning of these places. This epistemic reduction can be understood through what Asiya Bazdyrieva calls the ‘resourcification’ of Ukraine, its reduction in the economic and cultural imaginaries to a set of resources to be plundered and exchanged for profit. This ‘resourcifying’ logic continues to power Russia’s war against Ukraine today. The looting and destruction of archives, libraries, and museums is part of Russia’s continuing campaign to control Ukraine’s epistemic infrastructures, asserting hegemony over the meaning of its cultural space and environments.

Dimitra Gkitsa (Winchester School of Art)
Memory Matters: Revisiting Albania’s Post-Industrial landscapes and Wastelands

During the socialist regime Albania experienced a period of intense industrialisation. Large industrial complexes were built on the outskirts of every major city. The north became a mining site for extracting ferro-chrome and in the south large wastelands were turned into farming. With transition former industrial giants were abandoned. The same state of emptiness is also present in rural towns that once were inhabited by factory workers and miners. In addition to bearing witness to the socio-political transformations that occurred during the transition from state socialism to neoliberal democracy, such as migration, working conditions and welfare rights, post-socialist wastelands contain also matters that are pertinent to the present and the present that is yet to come. How are we to approach post-socialist post-industrial wastelands in the present? What other alternative possible presents and futures can we re-imagine for abandoned ruined infrastructure? And more crucially, why does such an engagement with the past matter for the present? Focusing on case-studies from the socialist and post-socialist countryside of Albania, the paper proposes a different understanding of post-industrial infrastructure. Rather than belonging to a long gone past, toxic or contaminated wastelands are still matters of the present. In so doing, the paper analyses extractivist and mining infrastructure in the town of Bulqize as well as the largest industrial sites in the country, the Metallurgical Complex in Elbasan. The paper juxtaposes the socialist visual cultures produced around these sites as well as the ways in which contemporary artists re-visit such abandoned sites, re-engaging with their materiality and stories. Theoretically, the paper draws inspiration from Karen Barad’s notion of “spacetimemattering” to argue that ruined industrial infrastructures transgresses linear understandings of time and space. This becomes apparent considering the current precarity struggles for environmental justice in Albania. Engaging critically with the materiality of an inherited past is thus, an entanglement with all the “others” that are gone and those “others” that are yet to come.

PANEL III: SYNTHETIC MATERIALISM

Andrija Filipović (Faculty of Media and Communication Belgrade)
Yugoslav Petroaesthetics: On the (Non-)Use of Petrochemicals in Socialist Modernism and Neo-Avant-Garde Art

It did not take long after the Second World War for petrochemicals to be adopted and adapted for artistic use in Yugoslavia. Plastics were used as a material in neo-constructivism (Koloman Novak), while everyday plastic objects and styrofoam were used in signalism (Miroljub Todorović) and conceptual performance (Slavko Matković and others). Both approaches relied on what can be called the aestheticisation of petrochemicals – a set of practices that made the use of petrochemicals in the production of art not only possible but highly desirable for signifying progressiveness: in neo-constructivism, plastics pointed to the erasure of difference between art and science; in signalism, plastics became art through the reduction of linguistic signs; in conceptual performance, the use of petrochemicals disrupted the boundaries between life and art. Aestheticisation made petrochemicals an artistic medium at the same time when functionalisation made them the stuff of everyday life. There were also artistic practices that avoided the use of petrochemicals. The Clear Streams Family, a back-to-the-land artistic commune founded in 1977 near the village of Brezovica, insisted on using wood, stone and other naturally occurring materials. The aim of this paper, then, is to show how petromodern practices such as the fossil fuel extraction and the use of petrochemical products such as plastics and styrofoam came to be not only present but actively eschewed in Yugoslav art – how they formed what could be called a Yugoslav petroaesthetics through the functionalisation and aestheticisation of petrochemicals, and the resistance to these practices.

Inga Lace (Almaty Museum of Arts)
Evolving Attitudes: Industry, Technology and Nature in Soviet Latvian Artists’ Works

This paper will examine the work of Latvian artist Zenta Logina (1908-1983) and exhibition series “Science and Science Fiction”, tracing artists’ engagement with scientific research and industry, and evolving of eco-critical attitudes in their work. The starting point for the research is the graphic artists’ exhibition series “Science and Science Fiction” that ran from 1975 to 1982 in Riga. Alongside depictions of venues of science, industry, and technology, many of the works dealt with issues connected to environmental consequences created by technology and extractive attitude towards nature in the Soviet Union. Artists’ observations often came from actual connection to the industry, for example, prior to the exhibitions, in 1974, several graphic artists visited the reactor of the Nuclear Research Centre in Salaspils, Latvia. Moreover, Inārs Helmūts and Aleksandrs Dembo had gone to Senezh, the so-called ‘City of Stars’, Russia, where would spend a week meeting cosmonauts and visiting spaceships; and Artūrs Ņikitins’ cycle “Olaines biochemical factory Biolar” is an example of engagement with chemical industry. In the meantime, the work of artist Zenta Logina also deals with science, nature, and cosmos, however, with a seemingly different attitude. Her three-dimensional paintings and textile work embody a close link with ecology but does so in a much less programmatic manner. In her work, anxiety about the Earth, the planet and our shared future resounds on a larger, planetary scale. What does rereading of those works from an eco-critical perspective reveal about the environmental histories of Latvia within the Soviet Union?

Anna Zett (Artist, Leipzig)
Dispose, Discard, Discare

In an everyday sense, disposal means throwing something away for good, that is to say, removing it from one’s personal realm of care or responsibility. This often involves drawing a boundary between inside and outside, private and public, object and abject, I and other, utopia and dump. During industrialization, privatization, and the development of global capitalism, the leftovers of extraction, production and consumption – worthless things and poisonous materials – ended up within the state’s realm of responsibility. I would argue that the way a state handles this unpopular, yet major public task, is indicative of its economic, ecological and political entanglements, and exposes the way this state tries to control its other problems, both internal and international. My case study for this research-based story is the GDR, a socialist state constructed within the ruins of Nazism and WW II, became a productivist utopia, turned into a material and emotional wasteland, until it was itself discarded in 1990. This story comes out of an artistic research at the GDR Opposition Archive in Berlin, where I looked into the East German environmental movement, encountered the West-East-garbage trade run by Stasi (the secret service), and began to disentangle the many symbolic, political and relational layers of this charged and discharged history. Based on published texts and video works, this lecture performs an analytical and associative act of care, proposing to look at waste as a political unconscious that overwhelmed the socialist state called German Democratic Republic.

PANEL IV: REAL TERRAFORMING

Anel Rakhimzhanova (Performance Studies NYU)
Constructing TurkSib and Human (Im)mobilities: When a Transit Materializes in the Environment, Episteme and Method

The transformation of Turkestan and Hungry Steppe into a cotton colony during Tsarist and Soviet rule left a lasting imprint on the region’s topography, embedding its manufacturing logistics into railway projects. Both systems of power envisioned their mission civilisatrice in the region in making arid steppes and desserts bloom by transferring the flows of rivers and its “unpredictable and uncontrollable inhabitants” to which they attributed the fickle nature of Central Asian water. Railway tracks mark not only the vectors between the hydraulic and agricultural projects, some turned into contemporary ecological disasters, but also trace the routes of mass displacements, the sedentarization of nomadic populations, and labor migration in the topographic imagination of Central Asian modernities. This paper delves into the process and context of the Turkistan-Siberian Railroad (TurkSib) construction that encapsulated both the tangible and symbolic subjugation of Nature and the “backward” nature of its habitats in the forging of the socialist path. Apart from the collectivization policies, the scientific abstraction of the environment dominated discussions on the efficiency of pastoralist nomadism in the engineered future of blossoming steppes and deserts. The TurkSib, however, didn’t directly “make the desert bloom” or “nomads settle to the tracks of modernity”, it simply provided an acceleration to those transit initiatives both in imagination, industrial and agricultural plannings that were reflected in the human (im)mobility policies. Drawing on archival sources, visual culture studies, and ethnography of human geography along the railways, I propose to unravel the complex interplay between infrastructure development, environmental change, and precarious human mobilities in the shaping of the Socialist Anthropocenes in Central Asia.

Maja and Reuben Fowkes (SAVA UCL)
Mighty Dams in the Hydrologics of the Socialist Anthropocene

The hydraulic infrastructures of state socialism cannot be disentangled from the interwoven ecological, economic, social, political, colonial, embodied, experiential and more-than-human repercussions of the developmental histories they epitomize, and as such they continue to configure the geo-eco-political crises of today. The mighty dams of socialism were not just barriers to water flow, but sites of energy extraction, engines of industry, deliverers of agricultural intensification and enablers of urbanization, as well as sites of trauma and extinctions of species, places and biocultural diversity, weapons of mass destruction and exacerbators of climate breakdown. They are also retainers of aqueous pasts, sites of forgetting and erasure, markers of resistance, generators of solidarities and partakers in cosmological shift. Countering the unitary narrative of the construction of mega-dams as conduits of the socialist ideology of mastery over the Earth, as inscribed in the terraforming blueprint of the Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature, we draw on environmental art history to illuminate the manifold submersions, reroutings and corrosions of socialist hydrologics. How were water management processes disclosed in commissioned artworks and what was obfuscated in representations of hydropower? How were social and ecological anxieties contained in dam portrayals and in what sense did they anticipate coming catastrophes? What tactics have artists employed to trace the mnemonic properties of waterways, resurfacing strategic amnesias, engendering more-than-human consciousness and disrupting the unitary temporalities of socialist developmentalism? To what extent did socialist histories of hydroforming enter into relation with the economic afterlives of socialism and are they still harbingers of worlds to come?

Sarah James (Liverpool School of Art and Design)
Radioactive Marxisms, Technocratic Dystopias & Socialist Ecofeminisms

Within the Marxist cultural worlds of the GDR it is possible to chart an unexpected and counter-intuitive coming together of historical materialist futurist utopias, countercultural artistic experimentation and eco-feminist critiques – orbiting around the dreams, nightmares and fall-out produced by atomic radiation and nuclear energy. During the Cold War the GDR became the third largest uranium producer in the world, and the largest producer of uranium in the former Eastern Bloc countries under the influence of the USSR. The race for nuclear energy and nuclear weapons animated the ideological battles and geopolitical relations of the cold war, but radiation as a nuclear concept and its new atomic aesthetics also had an afterlife in East Germany’s cultural worlds – where the geopolitical developments and catastrophes of the nuclear industries were materialised and the epistemic, aesthetic and environmental ruptures they embodied for socialist modernity, Marxism, human-nature relations and ecological activism were interrogated and reimagined in philosophy, literature, theatre and visual culture. This paper will examine how nuclear energy was grappled with from Bertolt Brecht’s rewriting of his Galileo – retooled in the aftermath of Hiroshima; Ernst Bloch’s messianic Marxism and its atypical failure to see through the ideology of the ‘peaceful atom’; Carlfriedrich Claus’s poetics of radiation; Christa Wolf’s radical refiguring of the pastoral and romantic in light of Chernobyl; and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s global activist anti-nuclear mail art. It will also consider the uncanny cultural sites and visual economies of atomic research centres and uranium mines, as in Dresden’s Rossendorfer Reactor – which became the unexpected home to subcultural experimental artistic happenings – or the vast art collection commissioned by the secretive uranium mining company Wismut as part of its production of a cultural world, including schools, cinemas, leisure and cultural centres amounting to a ‘state within a state’ designed to contain its employees and compensate them for the dangerous and radioactive work.

Rita Süveges (Artist, Budapest)
Cloud Seeding – the Glare of the Silver Bullet

The Hungarian animation series Mézga family introduced the fantastic Meteoromutomotor device to modify the bad weather they faced at a holiday, already in 1969. It reflected public sentiment, since national cloud seeding experiments started in the 1960’s. All in accordance to the postwar Soviet Union, that found new interests in weather and climate modification in the context of Cold War tensions, domestic needs in agriculture, and the ill-fated Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature. To solve the unintended consequences of human development technologically today – geoengineering is legitimized as a reactive risk-reduction fix. Yet its precursors were rather proactive attempts, such as regional weather modification techniques protecting crops. From folk and religious histories of storm demons to witches’ rituals, rainmakers and church bell ringing, science appropriated the initiative to control weather, and by now, reframed it as the silver bullet for the environmental crisis, the spoiled climate. The Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture is applying a countrywide cloud-seeding hail resistance system operating land devices in a 10 km grid. The hail cannons of the early 20^th century were quasi-scientific scams. Nonetheless today’s cloud seeding proves questionable despite its highly materialistic methods: silver iodide reagent must be spread into cloud formations either through acetone evaporation or aircrafts. This paper sets out to analyze – through the artistic research on cloud seeding – how Stalinistic science took over the project of mastering nature from magic, focusing on cultural artefacts and ethnographic connections, in addition speculating on past and possible new environmental imaginaries of the Post-Socialist Anthropocene.

PANEL V: RECORDS OF MONOCULTURALISATION

Agata Pietrasik (Freie Universität Berlin)
The Peasant Anthropocene: Images of Rural Life in SR

The beginning of communist rule in Poland after the Second World War was shaped by an unstable socio-political situation. The newly formed authorities, not wanting to rely solely on the Soviet Union to legitimise their rule, tried to inscribe the international postulates of Communism into local specificities. What distinguished Poland, especially from the industrial societies of Western Europe, was the fact that the social class that was to become the subject of the communist emancipatory struggle had to include not only the relatively small working class, but above all the peasantry. The late 1940s and 50s marked the beginning of radical changes in the countryside, such as increased educational efforts and the propagation of culture on a mass scale (traveling cinema and exhibitions). The subject of my paper will be the analysis of visual representations of these changes in socialist realist painting and photography in Poland. A task made all the more difficult by the fact that while the ethos of working class had a preexisting, leftist iconography, images of peasant life were closely associated with pastoral painting. In discussing the ways in which modernisation was represented in the countryside, I will not only focus on politicised images of the countryside that were important at the time, such as the painting “Our Land” by Andrzej Strumiłło. I will also explore the agency of rural artists, such as Felicja Curyło, who leveraged her artistic practice to expedite the electrification of her home village.

Rugilė Rožėnė (Vilnius University)
In Search of Authoritarian Landscape

In contemporary landscape studies, the prevailing interpretation of the modern human attitude towards nature as a mere resource proves inadequate when confronted with the legacy of socialist regimes. Grounded in materialist philosophy, communist ideology not only disregarded accountability toward nature but also toward human beings. Therefore, to achieve a deeper understanding of the processes of landscape changes that took place in Lithuania under Soviet occupation and their outcomes, the analysis of collective experiences and perceptions becomes crucial. Balancing between macro and micro scales, separate case studies importantly contribute to the concept of authoritarian landscapes. In this context, the life and work of self-educated artist Lidija Meskaityte (1926-1993) emerge. Due to childhood injuries, L. Meskaityte had difficulties moving and spent her entire life at her parents’ homestead in Smalininkai. In more than 700 miniature watercolors of her daily surroundings, she depicted the changes in the countryside caused by land amelioration, intensive agricultural activities, and even littering with great detail. However, in Soviet times, only a small group of idyllic scenes were presented to the broader audience, leaving the ideologically “uncomfortable” part of her creation, as well as complicated biographical moments, behind. L. Meskaityte’s story subtly uncovers the authoritarian nature of the socialist countryside modernization project, showing us a landscape in which the problematic aspects of its transformations, such as the impact on ecosystems, were neglected, the complexity of its experiences was suppressed, and representation – censored.

Jérôme Bazin (Paris-Est Créteil)
Socialist Intensification as seen by Amateur Photographers

In this talk, we will discuss a particular source: photographic albums preserved in regional archives in Bulgaria (we will present those from the Smolyan and Vratsa archives). The photographs were taken in the 1970s by local photographic clubs, to document life in the region, but also out of an interest in photographic art (it is part of the history of amateur clubs, lovers of photographic practice). In the albums, each page features between 10 and 20 small photographs, often resembling either a contact sheet or a page from a family album. Most of the images resemble those seen in the press at the time, created by the major national photographic agencies during the socialist era. But some of them intrigue and question.
We will focus on images that were simply captioned as “views” (изгледи), landscapes of the agricultural world. The photographers travelled through these two rural regions, each of which having particular characteristics (different topographies, different agricultural activities, different populations). The photographers were in a unique position, neither celebrating socialist productivism nor protesting against it from an ecological point of view. They saw agricultural transformation and its effects on nature, but also what did not change, agricultural intensification and its limits. We will situate this type of image in relation to other artistic creations in Bulgaria at the same time, realist works (for example the paintings of Kosta Leviev or Zlatyu Boyadjiev) and performances (for example those of Vesselin Dimov). Emphasis will be placed on the ambivalence of the discourse on the environment conveyed by this particularly rich visual material.

PANEL VI: ECOSOCIALIST PRAXES

Karolina Kolenda (Institute of Art and Design Krakow)
Earth, Matter, Rhythm: Władysław Hasior and the Socialist Anthropocene

In Poland, the last decade has brought a growing number of art projects, exhibitions, as well as critical writing addressing climate change, anthropogenic transformation of nature, and the great acceleration. However, the art critical discourse embraces the West-centric narrative of the Anthropocene, while artistic practices discussed in the Anthropocene context are mostly by environmentally engaged artists working today. Although artists address environmental issues that are often local or region-specific (such as the Oder catastrophe, toxic waste in post-industrial and mining sites, the deteriorating condition of the Baltic Sea, etc.), the ideas that underpin their reflection are rarely rooted in the local or historical (Socialist) discourses around nature and environmentalism. On the other hand, the scholarship on the neo-avant-garde beginnings of environmental art in Poland is still in the early stages of development (with several promising studies underway). In this paper, I would like to focus on one of Poland’s seminal neo-avant-garde artists, Władysław Hasior, whose work has recently been studied in new contexts, while his practices reinterpreted as demonstrating a complex and often ambiguous relationship to nature, Socialist ideology, and the rural landscape. This was possible thanks to the publication of his vast photographic archive, produced over many decades and partly published in 1983 in the “Nowa Wieś” [The New Countryside] magazine as “Photo Notebook.” Focusing on several series of photographs from this archive and taking into consideration Hasior’s work with explicitly ecological message (“Ecological Alarm”, 1982), I will argue that the “Photo Notebook”, together with its attendant artist’s commentary, allows us to read his work as anticipating contemporary conceptions of nature (as natureculture), while his observations of the rural landscape as critical of its anthropogenic transformation during Socialism.

Marie Meyerding (Freie Universität Berlin)
Visions of Trees: Environmental Art and Surveillance in the Global GDR

Art in the late German Democratic Republic (GDR) was one of the central sites for addressing the increasingly pressing global environmental issues. The socialist government made every effort to conceal the consequences of large-scale environmental pollution. By 1981, 300,000 hectares of forest were damaged by pollution. The mass-reproduced images of Waldsterben (forest dieback) caused by acid rain demanded that the GDR take a stand on this environmental disaster. This was, however, met with a simple denial of the existence of Waldsterben in the GDR and a ban on the term as well as images of destroyed trees. In this presentation, I explore how women artists in the GDR of the 1980s dealt with this prohibition and brought lessons learned from Waldsterben to the centre of attention through their practice despite censorship and surveillance. I consider Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Mail Art, an artistic movement focused on sending smaller artworks internationally through the mail, and in particular her work Save Nature, which explicitly references this theme by depicting a protective hand from which small trees seem to grow. I further examine Christa-Maria Jeitner’s outdoor-hung textiles, delving into her time-intensive manual work with flax plant fibres, with a specific focus on her Macramés and their installation in trees. A study of Annemirl Bauer’s eco-feminist painted portraits with trees concludes the presentation. Through these three artists’ preoccupation with trees, I highlight the complex relationships between socialist governments and women artists dealing with local and global environmental issues in the global GDR through gendered political protests.

Lenka Vráblíková (Goldsmiths University of London)
“The Czech Are Excellent Mushroom Hunters:” The Visual Politics of Fungi in (Post)Socialism

Mushroom foraging is a passion shared nationwide across all demographic and social groups of Czech society: over 70% of the population visit forests for mushroom foraging at least once a year, gathering almost 11kg of mushrooms per household. The paper explores how mushroom foraging as ‘nation’s precious hobby’ (Šiftová 2020) has figured in the negotiations of belonging in Czech (post)socialist cultural politics. The first part of the paper provides an analysis of the instrumental role mushrooms and their foragers have played in the articulation of Czech national identity and the country’s self-positioning within the broader frame of the current hegemonic geopolitics rooted in European colonialism. In the second part I close-read art works and other cultural practices that engage with fungi to envision new forms of belonging beyond the constraints of this hegemony, including art installation ‘Nothing Nowhere into Something Somewhere’ (Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkáčová, 2015) and poem ‘The Czech are Excellent Mushroom Hunters’ (Milan Kozelka, 2013).

The Other Side of the Pipeline
A performative screening of fragments of Where Russia Ends (2024) and conversation with filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski and cultural researcher Philipp Goll. Chaired by Tania Gómez (SAVA UCL).

Philipp Goll and Oleksiy Radynski will be in conversation around the film Where Russia Ends (2024) and discuss it in the context of ‘Leak. The End of the Pipeline’, a collaborative research project produced together with the artist Hito Steyerl at the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig in April 2024. Taking up the development of the gas pipeline system between Siberia and (West) Germany since the 1970s, the exhibition consists of an installative video sculpture entitled Leak and the essay film Where Russia Ends, the contents of which intertwine and correlate. In their talk, they will reflect on the collaborative process during the making of Where Russia Ends, which departs from a question: ‘What’s happening on the other side of the pipeline?’

The film Where Russia Ends (2024) examines the often-overlooked history of colonialism and environmental destruction in the Russian-occupied territories of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. In 2022, previously unknown film footage was discovered in Kyiv Science Film Studios (Kyivnaukfilm). It documents numerous expeditions that a group of Ukrainian filmmakers undertook in the 1980s to various parts of Siberia and the Far North. This material forms the basis for the reconstruction of the erased history of the numerous imperialist wars that Russia waged against its later colonies. Where Russia Ends examines the manifold forms of complicity that played a role in this, shedding light on the ideology of exploitation and development of natural resources. The film is a collaboration between filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski and researcher Philipp Goll.

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