Angewandte Interdisciplinary LabTalk in English by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (Postsocialist
Art Centre at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London)
Introduction: Christine Böhler (Cross-Disciplinary
Strategies)
The Socialist Anthropocene denotes the version of the Anthropocene that unfolded on
the socialist side of the Cold War divide. Its entwined social and environmental histories are illuminated in the art, and
visual culture of the socialist world, not least in depictions of the vast project of infrastructural, agricultural and geoengineered
interventions into the natural environment decreed in the Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature of 1948.
The presentation will consider the distinctiveness of the Socialist Anthropocene, including outlining
the tension between the modernising and colonising tendencies of socialist transformation, especially about the histories
of expansion into the indigenous territories of the Soviet North and South. Furthermore, it will address the alternative epistemologies
of socialist science, grounded in understanding the Earth as an interconnected ecological system and manifest in Soviet advances
in climate science since the 1960s.
A presentation of a poster edition on collaborative strategies
in the Anthropocene accompanies the talk. The Cross-Disciplinary Strategies Master Lab produced the edition in cooperation
with artist Claudia Holzinger (Applied Photography).
Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians,
curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College
London. Their publications include
Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022),
Central
and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021),
The
Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015)
and a special issue of Third
Text entitled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions
Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianism at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their Horizon
Europe project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant.
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