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SAVA Online Lecture on the Socialist Anthropocene at Yale
08 December 2022, 5:00 pm–6:00 pm
IAS Researchers Maja and Reuben Fowkes will give an online lecture on 'Sweet Ruins: Infrastructures of the Socialist Anthropocene' in the Yale University VISIONS OF ECOLOGY lecture series on Art and the Environment in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Reuben Fowkes
The hollowed-out spaces of derelict sugar factories documented by Slovak artist Ilona Németh in the project Eastern Sugar (2018-21) register the social impact of deindustrialization and symbolize the broken promises of the post-communist transition. The demise of the East European sugar industry also raises questions about the disappearance of the culture, lifestyles, as well as attitudes and practices towards the natural world, that grew up alongside socialist infrastructures. What can be learned from the ruins of sugar factories about the distinctive socialist path through the Anthropocene and what parallels can be drawn between the rise and fall of northern sugar beet and the social and environmental histories of southern sugar cane?
About the Speaker
Dr. Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes
Art historians, curators and co-directors at Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies
Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020) and Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions “Colliding Epistemes” at Bozar Brussels (2022) and “Potential Agrarianisms” at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their research on the “Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts” is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant.