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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