The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts: Online Special Issue Introduction
This special issue spanning ARTMargins Online and ARTMargins Print Journal derives from the ERC/UKRI supported project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) that foregrounds the contribution of environmental art history and research-driven contemporary ecocritical art to the interdisciplinary inquiry and epistemic endeavor of the Socialist Anthropocene.(The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) project is led by Maja Fowkes at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies; see: www.sava.earth.) The Socialist Anthropocene denotes a field of collective inquiry into the sociopolitical, geoeconomic, biocultural, and ecological ramifications of changing relations with nature under socialism. Resisting the tendency to subsume the socialist pathways of the Anthropocene within a universalizing account of the new geological times, it provides a framework to recover and reinstate the environmental history of the one third of the world that for much of the twentieth century lived in a socialist system. As an ecocritical tool, it investigates the drastic environmental impacts of industrial expansion through the extraction of raw materials, the construction of infrastructural networks, and the chemicalization of agriculture, in accordance with the ethos of technocratic domination over nature hardwired into the economic mechanism of five-year plans. At the same time, the Socialist Anthropocene casts light on the dormant environmentalisms inherent to the socialist project, which resurfaced in late socialism through a haze of chemical emissions. It prospects the possibilities within and alongside the system for the flourishing of non-exploitative relations with non-humans and geological entities, uncovering eco-socialist streams and salvageable policies with the potential to inform responses to the current climate impasse.
The assembled findings in this special issue published across two platforms investigate the records of the transformation of nature in socialist art history by discussing artworks that disclose the environmental impacts of the system’s extractivist, infrastructural, and terraforming interventions in the natural world. They also locate within socialist-era art practices the voicing of an ecological critique of the unconcealable costs of such progress-oriented development. The contributions of contemporary artists finetune the optics for apprehending these exorbitant histories to reveal their multiscalar, transtemporal, geoengineered, and beyond-human dimensions that still shape the environment today. Socialism’s bounteous ecological past is also accessed by these researchers as a repository of praxes for modeling alternative environmental futures.
The contributions published in ARTMargins Print Journal 14.2 focus on cross-cutting environmental issues rather than individual ecocritical responses, reconstructing the socialist imaginary of extractivism, hydrological and logistical infrastructures, nuclear legacies, and the industrialization of the countryside.
Meanwhile the contributions published here in ARTMargins Online bring to the fore singular artistic practices in contributions that unearth historical ecocritical positions or present contemporary activations of socialist environmental archives against the backdrop of intensifying climate disorder. Here, two art historical case studies analyzing artistic responses to the despoilation of nature under socialism are juxtaposed with two contemporary artistic research perspectives, which drill down into the socialist microhistories of weather manipulation and waste management to release their ecocritical charge for the present. Additionally, a roundtable discussion with art practitioners from Central Asia testifies to the vivacity of artistic and curatorial approaches arising from the collision of socialist legacies, colonial undercurrents, and ecological challenges in the region.
Karolina Kolenda’s contribution, “Earth, Matter, Rhythm: Władysław Hasior and the Socialist Anthropocene,” investigates the neo-avant-garde artist’s ecological critique of the anthropogenic transformation of the countryside in socialist Poland. Analyzing images from his photographic archive, sculptural works, and a tree-burning performance, Kolenda charts Hasior’s rising “ecological alarm” at the devastation of the natural world. In the art historical text “Christa Jeitner’s Visions of Trees,” Marie Meyerding argues that it was growing awareness of the finitude of natural resources and fears about the chemical pollution emanating from extractive industries that compelled East German artists of late socialism to address environmental issues in their work. Meyerding’s discussion of the practice of textile artist Christa Jeitner underlines how abstract compositions could also serve as vehicles for the articulation of ecological positions in socialist art. These forays into East European art history exemplify the potential of the Socialist Anthropocene as an interpretative framework for the analysis of environmental art under socialism.
Amongst the contemporary research-informed art practices featured here, artist Anna Zett interweaves textual and visual elements to illuminate the political, personal, and ecological ramifications of the Cold War waste trade, which saw household refuse and hazardous materials from West Germany disposed of in East German landfills in exchange for hard currency. Titled “Dispose, Discard, Discare,” this artistic project interrogates the deployment of waste disposal as a political metaphor and cross-border operation, counterposing western deprecation of East Germany as a toxic wasteland with actual environmental histories of socialist recycling and anti-consumerism. In an interview with the editors, Hungarian artist Rita Süveges discusses her artistic research into the phenomenon of weather manipulation. In Weather Spectres, the artist uncovers the origins of weather modification techniques such as cloud seeding in the experimental science of socialism, positing that the geoengineers’ belief in their ability to control the weather is a form of techno-scientific mythology that is equivalent to superstitions of medieval rainmakers.
Incorporating the beyond-east-Eurocentric epistemologies of the Socialist Anthropocene, the Roundtable on the Transformation of Nature in Central Asia brings together leading women artists, curators, and activists from the region to discuss its entangled ecological challenges and geopolitical predicaments. The conversation is conducted by SAVA Principal Investigator Maja Fowkes with artists Aïda Adilbek and Aziza Kadyri, curator Aigerim Kapar, researcher Anel Rakhimzhanova, and SAVA Creative Fellow Saodat Ismailova. Their exchanges point to the confluence of infrastructural, developmental, modernizing, imperialist and extractivist agendas, which in Central Asia are densely entwined with the legacies of Soviet intervention into natural and cultural domains. Combining personal stories, decolonial activism, and ecocritical research, the participants of the Roundtable share artistic perspectives on reparative procedures, collective approaches, and companionship with the natural entities of the region.
The environmental art history of socialism, as demonstrated through these collected articles, reveals an entangled, multilayered, and interdependent relationship to the natural world, dispelling reductive assumptions about the ecological legacies of the socialist system. In this sense, the Socialist Anthropocene becomes an emancipatory project to reconsider these histories systemically and independently from the constraints of the established Anthropocene narrative. With its material and immaterial infrastructures still conditioning current ecological realities, as the contributions of contemporary artists testify, the environmental heritage of socialism – from recycling and degrowth to redistribution and solidarity – is also rediscovered as a wellspring of viable models in the struggle against the closing horizons of the climate crisis.
Articles published as part of the Special Issue:
