Tuesday 12 March 2024
6-8.00 pm

Screening of Oleksiy Radynski’s Infinity According to Florian
A screening of SAVA Creative Fellow Oleksiy Radynski’s film Infinity According to Florian (2022) with a Q&A with the filmmaker and response by Robin Schuldenfrei (Courtauld Institute of Art).
Location: IAS Common Ground

What is Earth? What is a solar system? What is humanity? Who is Florian Yuriev? Why did he build a UFO building in Kyiv? Will we be able to use it for its intended purpose in the future? SAVA Creative Fellow Oleksiy Radynski’s Infinity According to Florian (2022, 70 minutes) deals with these questions, related to the legendary figure of Kyiv-based architect Florian Yuriev. This film also recounts why capitalism is a thing of the past, and what happens when you divide one by infinity.

Wednesday 13 March 2024
4-6.15pm
SAVA Panel on Petro-Socialism
Location: IAS Forum

With Leyla Sayfutdinova (University of Glasgow), Maja and Reuben Fowkes (SAVA UCL), Jan Burek (SAVA UCL) and Rado Ištok (National Gallery Prague) IAS Forum

The SAVA panel on Petro-Socialism addresses the infrastructures of oil extraction, from the politics of pipelines to the construction of the first off-shore oilrigs, petrobartering in the transfer of technology and expertise, the operations and environmental impacts of chemicalization, and the naturalization of socialist petroculture in the visual arts.

In her talk From here to eternity: past, present and future of the Caspian Oil Rocks, Leyla Sayfutdinova (Senior Lecturer in Critical Area Studies, University of Glasgow) examines the history of the Soviet Union’s first offshore extraction facility, Oil Rocks, which was built in 1949-1958 in the Caspian Sea some 100 km away from Baku. Celebrated at the time as yet another instance of the Soviet conquest of nature, it soon became technologically outdated with the development of semi-submersible drilling platforms in 1960s. But despite this, Oil Rocks remain a site of active, if diminishing production of oil and gas, ongoing ecological disaster due to poorly sealed wells, and a late industrial ruination prone to technogenic accidents. Her presentation explores the temporality of this project of high Soviet modernity, and discuss how Oil Rocks are inscribed in the narratives of the past, present and future of oil in Azerbaijan.

The presentation Caspian Oil on Canvas: Socialist Petroculture in Azerbaijani Art by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (SAVA UCL) investigates the environmental art history of oil exploitation in Soviet Azerbaijan. What do artistic representations of the industry reveal about the status of the oil worker within the petroculture of fossil socialism? How did artists celebrate oil-powered social and industrial progress, articulate the ethos of ‘commanding the Earth to serve Socialism’, discover in the severe style a match for the harsh struggles of the Caspian oil pioneers, capture the sublime of socialist modernity and naturalize the unique oil heritage of the Absheron Peninsula? And in the year that Baku is set to host the COP29 Climate Summit, is techno-utopianism the only pathway for green transition?

SAVA Research Fellow Jan Burek will speak on Building and Contesting the Chemical Future: the Development of the Polish Petrochemical Industry and the Struggle against Water Pollution, 1958-1969. The decision to construct the Druzhba pipeline significantly altered the plans for the development of the Polish economy in the late 1950s. Thanks to Soviet oil, Poland was supposed to enter a new era of prosperity and modernity with synthetic materials made from cheap petrochemicals not only fulfilling local needs but becoming extremely profitable exports. The sleepy, medieval town of Płock where a refinery and petrochemical plant connected to the pipeline was erected was to become a beacon of this bright chemical future. Around the same time, however, the pollution of water connected with the progressing chemicalization of the economy became a cause of concern for various state and non-state actors. A problem that the construction of the pipeline and Płock plant only exacerbated and brought to the attention of the wider public due to the conspicuous olfactory nature of petrochemical pollution.

Curator Rado Ištok (National Gallery in Prague) will give a presentation entitled From Basra to Kralupy: Czechoslovak oil refineries in Iraq. In the history of the oil industry, the year 1976 was marked by two events in Czechoslovakia: first, the oil refinery in Kralupy near Prague was put into permanent operation, and second, the book Černé miliardy [Black Billions] on the history and politics of oil extraction by the Czech journalist Jiří Hronek was published. Interestingly, the oil refinery in Kralupy benefited from some of the expertise which the Brno-based company Chepos developed during the construction of the oil refinery in Basra in southern Iraq, launched in 1974, as also observed by Hronek. Since 1969, during the last two decades of the Cold War, Czechoslovakia – alongside other socialist countries – was instrumental in the development of Iraq’s nationalised oil industry – until then dependent on the British and US-American expertise – in exchange for convertible currencies or petrobarter. His presentation is based on collaborative work with visual artist Jiří Žák and draws on materials from the archives of Czech television.

6.30-8pm

Screening of Tekla Aslanishvili’s A State in A State
Location: IAS Forum

A screening of Tekla Aslanishvili’s A State in A State (2022) introduced by scriptwriter Evelina Gambino (University of Cambridge).

A State in a State (2022, 47’) is an experimental documentary film by Georgian artist Tekla Aslanishvili that follows the construction, disruption, and fragmentation of railroads in the South Caucasus and Caspian regions. It examines railways as the technical materialisation of the fragile political borders that have reemerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Revolving around the scenes of delay and waiting that constitute cargo mobility, the film reads the optimistic narratives about the New Silk Road against the grain. It observes how the iron foundation of connectivity can be used as a weapon of exclusion and geopolitical sabotage. Dotting the same lines, other forms of sabotage are deployed by workers to disrupt the political violence. Looking at historic and current practices of resistance A State in a State explores the potential of railroads for building a different, infrastructural consciousness and the lasting, transnational, kinship among the people who live and work around them. The film is developed in artistic-scientific collaboration with Dr. Evelina Gambino, Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge.

Thursday 14 March 2024
4-5pm
From Energetic Colonialism to Nuclear Terrorism
Location: IAS Forum

Svitlana Matviyenko (Simon Fraser University) and Oleksiy Radynski (SAVA UCL) in conversation on the militarization of nuclear infrastructures.

In the early stages of Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Russian troops had occupied the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in history, and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (Europe’s largest), which remains Russia-occupied to this day. This marks a new development not only in terms of ways of war (never had a nuclear facility of this kind been occupied by an invading army before), but also in decades-long colonial tactic of weaponising energy resources – first by the USSR, then by the Russian Federation. This development also posits nuclear terror as an element of information warfare, with radiation as a global mass medium (Svitlana Matviyenko). This talk is based on our joint experience of travelling to and researching the Chornobyl Zone of Exclusion both before the Russian occupation and in its aftermath, and will include evidence collected during the documentation of this war crime (Chornobyl 22 documentary by Oleksiy Radynski).

5-7pm

SAVA Panel on Infrastructural Internationalism
Location: IAS Forum

With Monika Motylińska (Leibniz Institute Berlin), Alessandro Iandolo (SSEES UCL), Dubravka Sekulić (Royal College of Art) and Eszter Szakács (University of Amsterdam)

This SAVA panel will consider the physical and cultural infrastructures of socialist internationalism, from flagship histories of East-South industrial collaboration and dam-building as a symbol of modernity for the Third World and site of Cold War competition, to the alternative networks for economic development of the non-aligned movement and the residues of state-managed solidarity campaigns.

Monika Motylińska (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS), Erkner, Germany) will give a presentation on Constructing Solidarity? Comecon Joint Ventures in Cuba and Ethiopia. In the official discourse of the Eastern Bloc, the nickel plant ‘Las Camariocas’ in Cuba or the cement plant ‘New Mugher’ in Ethiopia were depicted as flagships of socialist collaboration under the label of the Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance). Focussing on these two spectacular projects, she will scrutinise the joint Comecon effort, looking at several layers of the entanglements between Cuba, Ethiopia and the European socialist states and the German Federal Republic in particular. This is an attempt to provide a suitable framework for addressing issues like the policies of the Comecon in the building industry towards non-European countries and to identify actors playing a crucial role in the knowledge production and transfer across the Comecon in the context of architecture and urban planning. The materialised results of the Comecon joint ventures enable us to consider the broader question of industrial infrastructures within global socialisms. At the same time, the focus on contractors is an opportunity to rethink the role of the builders. This talk is based on the extensive archival research and oral history collection in Germany as well as on the results of the ongoing PhD project by Juliane Richter on the architectural circulations between the GDR and Cuba, of which she is co-supervisor.

Alessandro Iandolo (SSEES UCL) will speak on Damming West Africa: The Politics of Hydroelectric Energy in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. Dams were the ultimate symbol of Cold War modernity. Since the early 1950s, most postcolonial states in Africa and Asia harbored the ambition of building new dams and establishing energy self-sufficiency through hydroelectric power. West Africa was no exception. In Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah dreamed of making the Akosombo dam a pillar of economic modernization. Ahmed Sékou Touré in Guinea and Modibo Keïta in Mali hoped to revive dam projects from the colonial era to empower the economies of their anti-colonial states. In all cases, their ambitions needed to overcome numerous challenges – geographical, scientific, financial, and, above all, political. How to design, build, finance, and manage a dam presented a series of complex political choices, often forcing governments to choose between stark alternatives: collective or individual, state or market, industrial or commercial, ultimately socialism or liberalism. This paper explores these dilemmas, arguing that political preferences were at the heart of the push for economic modernization in West Africa.

Dubravka Sekulić (Royal College of Art) will present on Infrastructures between Solidarity and Debt – Nonalignment and Yugoslav Construction Industry. Looking at the infrastructure projects constructed by Energoprojekt, Yugoslav construction company from Belgrade in non-aligned countries mostly in Africa, can be a useful lens for understanding of the complexities of post-independence state building and the role of infrastructure in these processes. Timothy Mitchell stresses how infrastructure building is inherently connected to the issues of debt and how they foreclose future. From the contemporary vantage point of compound environmental, economic, and societal problems, many infrastructure projects across the world especially those built in the period between early 1960 and late 1980 seem irrational, however reading these projects in the context of the struggles and failures to establish different more equitable world international economic order can offer a more nuanced understanding not only of past processes but also future attempts for worldmaking. In my paper I will try to offer a reading along these lines following projects of Energoprojekt in Zambia and Zimbabwe. 

In her presentation titled Residues of State-Managed Solidarities, curator and researcher Eszter Szakács (University of Amsterdam) will speak about the role of the state in Cold War solidarity projects in art and culture, examining their remnants from the perspective of the archive and surviving institutions. Based on the recently published anthology Solidarity Must Be Defended which she co-edited with Naeem Mohaiemen on visual arts projects exploring solidarity, realised and failed, within the Cold War era, in her talk she will contrast state-managed forms of solidarity organising with grassroots solidarity projects. She will examine these through the lens of several contributions to the anthology: Hungarian propaganda publications from the socialist era about the ‘Arab World,’ as well as through the histories of state-initiated Pan-African festivals and artistic campaigns in Latin America.