#envhum

[uclpact]

We are pleased to announce our podcast ‘Left to be Desired’ is now live. In episode 2 of Left to be Desired, Maja and Reuben Fowkes converse with Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova about the turbulent legacies of the Soviet transformation of Central Asia.

Left to be Desired is available to listen to on Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible, Apple Podcasts and Audacy. You can also access it via the podcast website: https://lefttobedesired.libsyn.com/site

Left to be Desired podcast explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global Socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes will invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.

Saodat Ismailova grew up in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and is now based in Tashkent and Paris. Ismailova’s filmography addresses themes of national memory, women’s sovereignty, ritualism and mortality. In 2021 she founded Davra a research group devoted to the study, documentation and dissemination of Central Asian culture. In 2022 her work was selected for both the Venice Biennale and Documenta. Thank you to Saodat Ismailova for joining us! This podcast is edited by Sammara Abbasi.

#lefttobedesired #socilaistanthropocene #saodatismailova #podcast #art #soviet #climatechange #envhum #art history

[awesomestarpower]

I made a twitter for academic content, will post mostly related to my PhD in the Environmental Humanities field. Would love to follow some more academics in literature or EH.

#Me #Academic #Academia #Twitter #Environmental Humanities #Literature #Envhum

[rachelcarsoncenter]

By Martín Fonck, Saskia Brill & Noemi Quagliati

“Stuff happens off camera, the pen only moves so fast, you can only sit in one chair, not all the chairs in all the room. This is good, honest objectivity because it has good, honest limits. The instruments for observation are here, not over there, and definitely not everywhere all at once. What you read has a partial perspective” (Watts, 2018:6)

In February 2020, we, the members of the doctoral program from the RCC, invited Laura Watts from the University of Edinburgh as our guest speaker for the Lunchtime Colloquium. We were curious to hear about Laura’s work not only because of her interesting research on energy landscapes, but also for her experience in creative and speculative writing. Laura is an ‘Ethnographer of Futures’ as well as a writer, artist, and poet. Her research, based on the Orkney Islands, explores ‘landscapes on the edge,’ where she asks how futures are imagined and made.

Landscapes and temporalities play a huge role in many of our own projects and in our writing processes. We therefore asked Laura to present her ethnographic experience and perspective on speculative futures at the RCC lunchtime colloquium. We also wanted to organize a writing workshop in which we could learn from her experiences in a more informal setting, and explore creative, speculative, and experimental ways of writing with landscape. She agreed, and so we invited doctoral students from our program and fellows of the RCC to apply to the workshop with an image of the landscape they are working with. Even though we didn’t have a concrete idea of what exactly would happen in the workshop, we expected that these images of landscapes would help to provoke writing in new ways. And since we did not only want to talk about writing, but to have space for our own creations, we decided to base the workshop on practical exercises.

We started the workshop on a Friday morning at 9am. The desks in the conference room were prepared with the images of our landscapes as well as pens and blank paper for everybody. As the participants entered the room, they roamed around, going through the images as you would in an exhibition before finally stopping at a familiar picture. When we started, we were sitting in front of our selected landscapes, ready to explore possibilities of writing about and with them.

Landscapes laid out on the tables the beginning of the workshop

To start the day with a bit of inspiration, Laura gave us a presentation about the craft of writing and her vision of scientific narratives. She reminded us that when we write, we produce knowledge and worlds. With that comes the responsibility to reflect thoroughly. Going back to the beginning of science in the 17th century, she illustrated how the production of scientific knowledge began with the requirement of evidence (Daston, 1991), alongside a specific use of language. This language was characterized by the separation of the author from the setting.  The passive voice was also used to create a sense of objectivity. This style has been central for the creation of authority, which has then generally been attributed to white men. Scientific language thus strongly incorporates gender and power into the process of knowledge production and is therefore entangled with an epistemological and emotional position.

Laura Watts giving her talk “Speculative Worlds – A Writing Craft”

She then remarked that, although technologies and experimental setups have fundamentally changed over time, the language used in science has not. By stating this, she also invited us to find new, contemporary uses of language for our respective scientific setups and communities. Exploring creative ways of writing allows us to put ourselves into different perspectives and spaces from which we can then imagine futures. Laura showed us the effects that the setting, voice, punctuation, rhythm, repetition, sentences shape, etc. can have on the message conveyed. She invited us to give space for the exploration of creative ways of writing with our landscapes and to not be afraid of making mistakes. Recognizing the presence of landscape in our research and the emotions it provokes is an empirical and honest exercise.

After this really inspiring input, we moved to the first practical exercise of today:

Choose an entity of your landscape and make it speak!

We had 15 minutes to come up with a sentence or a short paragraph which we were to present afterwards. Selecting the entity, we wanted to let speak dragged us deep into the composition of the landscape—thinking about what the entity would say from a previously unconsidered point of view revealed its many dimensions. We wrote a few words, crossed them out again and tried anew. We soon realized that a landscape in itself portrays a limit. Concrete spaces and specific perspectives have to be chosen. The limited amount of time forced us to think fast, to not overthink and to go with the flow. The following presentations of the individual works revealed the many different ways in which this task could be approached. We heard underground water, moonlight, reindeers, trucks, rocks, and molecules speak—to mention just a few. They expressed concerns about changes within the landscapes, reflections on their own state of being, thoughts on their role in the world, or their fear of death. And even though we only had a few minutes to come up with these different forms of expression, every single contribution had a beautiful sense of depth, creativity, consciousness, and/or humor in them that deeply impressed the rest of the group.

In the following discussion, we did not only discuss the opportunities this change of perspective can offer. Concerns about ethics, the limits of thinking through non-human experiences, and the rationale behind the exercise were also raised. Speaking for an entity is challenging. Some of the participants felt blocked during the first minutes. However, it was interesting to see the different ways in which the pieces of writing addressed this problem. What to do when you feel that blockage? First, try to leave your ego behind and start exploring. Maybe it is not necessary to name the limits of the landscape with words. The structure, the rhythm, or the voice can also help us to give a shape to these limits. The ending is also a crucial aspect of our stories. It is, in fact, what ultimately gives a plot its meaning. The very last sentence can even change the plot all together. It sets a limit to the story that is being told and the temporalities we think with. It is thus not just about how we write, but how we conclude. With this in mind we went on to the second task for today:

Chose that same entity and make it speculate about its future!

We had again 15 minutes to come up with a sentence or a short paragraph. This exercise made us think in temporal dimensions very different from our own as humans, be they those of an insect that has no more than a day to live, or chemicals that will exist for eternity. What would an insect fear? What the hopes of a sward? What does a truck work towards? And what would a rock be waiting for? It certainly felt weird, maybe even unsettling, to think that way. But as soon as we put ourselves into the “shoes” of “others,” the landscape changed its appearance. The focus shifted. The future changed.

In the presentations that followed, the contributions were extremely diverse and used language in a beautifully figurative way—even though (or perhaps because) many of us don’t speak English as our first language. For us as scientists it felt scary yet refreshing to speculate about what could be to come, not knowing exactly what is or will be, daring to make assumptions about a distant future based on the present. And it felt equally scary yet refreshing to use a language beyond academic structures. Laura’s invitation was to not feel limited by the different audiences we have in mind while writing. If you want to explore new ways, start writing for yourself. How does the text speak to you? Which emotions does the text provoke for you? Only start thinking about the audience when you come to edit the already written text.

Writing, discussing and thinking about writing with landscape

We as organizers are deeply grateful. We are grateful for Laura’s time and the knowledge about the craft of writing she shared. We are grateful for the curiosity of our fellow students and fellows in taking part in this little adventure. We are grateful for everybody’s courage in presenting “first drafts.” We are grateful for the collective and creative space that emerged that morning in the 4th floor conference room. We are grateful for the critical questioning of methods and approaches. And we are grateful for the delicious food we had in the breaks alongside inspiring, cheerful, and deep chats. For us, this felt like a good way to do academia otherwise. To hold space for experimentation and exploration. To dare to speculate. And most importantly to do that collectively with our landscapes.

At the very end, Laura gave us one last task:

Write your experiences or thoughts about this workshop today as if you were tweeting about it!

Here are some of the results:

Thinking in place, space, time, across scapes and shapes, finding words for wolds, imagining consequences. Strudel in my head #writingwithlandscape @LauraWatts @RCC

#writingworkshop with @LauraWatts: Writing from an environmental point of view can change your perspective. #writing #otherwise

“Writing with Landscape” workshop at @carsoncenter: “As the time goes by, the blank space on my sheet gets smaller – covered by the black ink of my pen. Thinking through, with and about writing means to do our job properly. Thank you @laurawatts.” #AcademicTwitter

The Entanglements across times & dimensions

of conversations never had

shifting identities – desires memories longings

and a possibility of convergences. Of hopes.

The assumption of Authority, Modesty, and One

Truth. These are our symptoms. Dear Doctor, how do we write in less

fossilized forms?

Today was about breakdown, building from the ruins & the importance of creativity.

The craft of words. We bring our landscape. We explore writing. First, giving a voice to an entity and then speculating about futures. However, impossibilities emerge. In fact, in landscape there is always a distance. But writing is always a way of giving a shape, a rhythm to destruction.

Writing with Landscape—A Workshop with Laura Watts By Martín Fonck, Saskia Brill & Noemi Quagliati “Stuff happens off camera, the pen only moves so fast, you can only sit in one chair, not all the chairs in all the room.

#creative writing #envhist #envhum

[historyinculture]

#outdoors #envhum #filmstudies

[mkulimaforum]

This is definitely worth reading. Fascinating data about soy production. #envhum #farming #foodsecurity https://t.co/BDxqICJ3RS

— Catherine Price (@CatherineJPrice) February 4, 2020

[newsuburbanism]

"If nature only counts in a 'pure' form why bother caring for the places we actually live in?" #envhist #envhum https://t.co/SuYFyfTqgN— Tina Adcock (@TinaAdcock) June 13, 2017

http://twitter.com/TinaAdcock/status/874670008697102340

#IFTTT #Twitter #TinaAdcock #Likes

[uclpact]

We are pleased to announce our podcast ‘Left to be Desired’ is now live. In episode 1 of Left to be Desired, Maja and Reuben Fowkes talk to Austrian artist Oliver Ressler about his recent work around extractivism and explore connections with socialist geographies.

Left to be Desired is available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and Audacy. You can also access it via the podcast website: https://lefttobedesired.libsyn.com/site

Left to be Desired podcast explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global Socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes will invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker who produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, migration, the climate crisis, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Since 2019 Ressler directs Barricading the Ice Sheets, a research project on the climate justice movement, funded by the Austrian Science Fund, that lead to an exhibition at Camera Austria in Graz in September 2021. Barricading the Ice Sheets is currently on view at The Showroom

Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) is the first large-scale interdisciplinary research project that institutes the Socialist Anthropocene as a new field of study within the critical corpus concerned with challenging and decentring the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene, asserting the constitutive role of the twentieth century environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. It is led by Maja and Reuben Fowkes, who are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.

This podcast is edited by Sammara Abbasi.

#lefttobedesired #oliverressler #podcast #socialistanthropocene #artists #art history #anthropocene #envhum #art podcast #socialism

[uclpact]

Left to be Desired

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our new podcast ‘Left to be Desired’. Maja & Reuben Fowkes will invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene. We hope this podcast will help you engage further in these themes and with artists’ works.

#art history #anthropocene #LefttobeDesired #podcast #new #artpodcast #artist #envhum #ecology #climatechange #socialistanthropocene #socialism

[uclpact]

For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted: Ecocentric Practices for Land Restoration

Co-Directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) Maja and Reuben Fowkes will be presenting ‘For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted: Ecocentric Practices for Land Restoration’ on April 12th as part of the ‘Matter Matters: The Aesthetics and Politics of Soil’ panel at the 49th Annual Association for Art History Conference, taking place at University College London.

About the Presentation:

As climate breakdown tests the ecological limits of heavy agriculture, how have artists exposed the entwined colonial and environmental histories of land and proposed ecocentric practices based on more-than-human comradeship and care? These questions are addressed through Anetta Mona Chişa’s One Are (2021), which translated the Roman unit of territory into a 100m2 inverted cast of a ploughed field to reveal the materiality of the soil in its earthy imprint of tilling, cracking and erosion. Also considered is Cooking Sections’ For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted (2019), which engaged with the histories of chernozem from the Ukrainian steppe, from the terror of Soviet grain requisitioning to the impact of shifting climatic zones. The artist duo also collaborated with lawyers to legally enshrine the defence of the soil against capitalist extractivism, encapsulating the planetary tipping point in attitudes towards what anthropologist Kristina Lyons calls the “complex self-organising system” underground.

Image: Anetta Mona Chişa, One Are (2021)

#socialistanthropocene #arthistory #envhum #annualconference #forarthistory2023 #research #art history #UCL #land reform #ecocentrism #ecostructure #soil #enviornment

[uclpact]

Socialist Anthropocene: Artistic Perspectives on the Great Transformation of Nature

Co-Directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) Maja and Reuben Fowkes to give a guest lecture on the Socialist Anthropocene at the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL), University of Applied Arts Vienna on 23 March 2023, 6pm.

The Socialist Anthropocene denotes the version of the Anthropocene that unfolded on the socialist side of the Cold War divide, the particular histories of which have been side-lined in the west-centric and universalizing narrative of the new geological age. 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. This presentation will consider the distinctiveness of the Socialist Anthropocene, including outlining the tension between the modernizing and colonizing tendencies of socialist transformation, especially in relation to 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 the understanding of the Earth as an interconnected ecological system and manifest in Soviet advances in climate science since the 1960s. To what extent can then the Socialist Anthropocene be approached as a potential source of ecological models and practices to confront the planetary crisis of climate change?

Image Used: Saule Suleimenova, One Steppe Forward, 2019. Courtesy the artist.

#art history #art #research #Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL) #social history #envhum #UCL #socialist anthropocene #anthropocene #vienna #Saule Suleimenova #University of Applied Arts Vienna

[uclpact]

Epistemologies of the Socialist Anthropocene

‘Epistemologies of the Socialist Anthropocene’ will explore attitudes and approaches to the natural world under socialism, focusing on the divergent histories of Soviet science, the corrosive legacies of nuclear culture and planetary impacts of militarism.

Jonathan Oldfield Professor in Russian Environmental Studies and Head of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. He will discuss Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky’s understanding of the biosphere and related concept of the noösphere as the sphere of human thought.

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University London. Her publications include 'The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World' (2016). She will consider the ways in which the Soviet nuclear military-industrial complex is materially preserved, critically reassessed and mythologised as cultural heritage.

SAVA Creative Fellows Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan are Bucharest and Vienna based artists and have collaborated since 2012. Their research-driven art practice examines hidden patterns in historical, social, and geopolitical narratives through installation, video, and performance. Their project for the Socialist Anthropocene, "Prospecting S.A.", explores the Romanian-African joint economic ventures and their legacies since the first Romanian trans-African expedition. They will present their project on the Debrisphere, a term they coined to denote the layer of the planet that is transformed by military intervention into aquatic and terrestrial landscapes.

Link: SAVA: Epistemologies of the Socialist Anthropocene | Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) - UCL – University College London

Photo: Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, 'Debrisphere, Landscape as an extension of the military imagination', 2017.

#art history #research #social history #environment #environmental justice #socialism #postsocialism #anthropocene #socialist anthropocene #soviet russia #romania #eastern europe #envhum #UCL #london #discourse

[rachelcarsoncenter]

Stimmenspur - Sound Trails in the English Garden

Stimmenspur – Sound Trails in the English Garden

The album-cover of the audio experiment, which you can download or stream to your phone. We are currently working on a shorter lunchtime version as well as a guided tour that features parts of the experiment. (Photo by Vera Kovács, 2017)

Have you ever burst into tears when a song came on the radio that reminded you of a loved one lost? Have you ever avoided going a certain route or into a…

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#aural #envhist #envhum #munich #podcast #public parks #walking

[historyinculture]

#wildlife #Audubon #Environment #envhum