Maja and Reuben Fowkes are invited as keynote speakers to give a lecture on the occasion of the 30th Anniversary of The Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA).
Their lecture, as a contribution to a beyond-human East European art history, will consider how arboreal politics was articulated in socialist art, reconstructing the revolutionary reorganization of nature from state-commissioned artistic representations and assessing the potential in such practices to express environmental critique.
With their more-than-human temporalities, vital role in ecosystems and as protagonists of biological socialism, trees were the experimental subjects of utopian science and also politicized in ideological projections that rendered saplings and blossoms harbingers of communist futurity. Treated as an expendable yet renewable resource for achieving the targets of a planned economy, clear-cutting went hand in hand with the planting of trees in vast shelterbelts. Both extractive forestry and instrumentalized afforestation constituted forms of anthropogenic interference in natural systems and were implicated in the colonial expansion of the Soviet system. At the same time, forest worlds could become sites of refuge and resistance, while new forms of arboreal politics emerged through reconnective practices of forest recreation and the growth of mass movements for nature protection.
In a political system that placed art at the service of social transformation and required artists to align with the programme of socialist forestry, what was the scope for expressing environmental consciousness and how did artists turn the tables in the ideological mobilization of trees? In light of the non-compliance of trees with national and regional boundaries, what are the methodological implications of arboreal ecologies for area-centric approaches in art history and why should we go beyond East-Eurocentrism? Finally, how could the Socialist Anthropocene, with its dynamic relation to Indigenous and decolonial studies, provide a framework to engage in a conversation about the planetary stakes of environmental art history, while illuminating systemic socialist attitudes and practices towards the natural world.