)
SAVA is a visual arts led interdisciplinary research project that challenges the westcentric discourses of the anthropocene by asserting the constitutive role of the environmental histories of socialism in the formation of new geological times.
Generously supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) for the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Dr. Maja Fowkes in the School of History and Art History, the project sees a dynamic team of art historians, an environmental historian, an environmental anthropologist and creative fellows uncover the entangled histories and ecological potentialities of the Socialist Anthropocene, from the Baltics and Central Asia to former socialist states in Africa and Latin America.
)
The SAVA research is organised around five thematic streams through which the distinctiveness, epistemologies, relationalities and potentialities of the Socialist Anthropocene are analysed, namely: the socialist praxis of extractivism, infrastructures of the socialist system, transformation of the countryside, species under socialism and cultures of the Socialist Anthropocene. The groundbreaking approach of the project is to reconstruct the histories of the Socialist Anthropocene through visual arts led interdisciplinary research. This entails analysing historical artworks and engaging with contemporary art practices, which act as a catalyst to integrate the insights of multiple disciplines and as a critical agent to pose ambitious and expansive questions, challenging assumptions and engendering new cross-disciplinary paradigms to illuminate the specificities of the socialist path through the Anthropocene.
Along with ecocritical art history, SAVA incorporates the insights of environmental history, the history of science and beyond-human anthropology, fields that are highly generative of critical reassessments of the Anthropocene, while drawing on global studies of historical socialisms to go beyond regionalism and formulate the Socialist Anthropocene as a globally relevant concept. The project involves twice-yearly SAVA Research Weeks at the Sainsbury Centre with roundtable discussions and public events, annual research trips to global sites of the Socialist Anthropocene, as well as conferences, publications and the podcast series Left to be Desired.
Principal Investigator Dr. Maja Fowkes leads the interdisciplinary SAVA Team of art historian Dr. Reuben Fowkes, environmental historian Dr. Sorcha Thomson, environmental anthropologist Dr. Makar Tereshin, SAVA Creative Fellow, Sammy Baloji, and research assistant Natalia Pavlovicova. Before transferring to UEA’s School of History and Art History in October 2025, the project was previously hosted at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. The SAVA research is documented on the website www.sava.earth
Read the open access introduction to the special issue of ARTMargins Journal volume 14 issue 2 (June 2025), by guest editors Maja and Reuben Fowkes.
)
“Lead, zinc, copper, coal, gold, cadmium, silver, oil, tungsten, corundum, gasoline, nickel, marble, Glauber's salt [and] phosphorites” flow from Kazakhstan through the “full arteries of railroads,” delivering its “industrial blood” across the Soviet Union “to feed the factories and plants,” before returning “in the shape of airplanes, tractors, excavators, automobiles [and] turbines.”1 This entry, under the heading “Socialist Metabolism,” appeared in an issue of the showcase journal USSR in Construction devoted to the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet Kazakhstan, cataloging the precious minerals, metals, rocks, and hydrocarbons extracted from the Central Asian republic to supply the expanding socialist industrial complex. In an ideological balancing act, the raw materials come back in the form of machinery to transform the mountains, bring water to the steppe, and tend crops and herds, completing the biomorphic cycle by which “the riches of the Earth's interior become riches of the surface—meat, wool, leather, fish and cotton.”2 This short passage, in a richly illustrated edition designed by artist couple Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, does not fail to emphasize
substances in the socialist industrial organism pulsates “in obedience to the beating of its mighty and wise heart—the Kremlin,”3 inadvertently revealing the imperial agenda hardwired into this circulatory system.
Find out more about the SAVA project by listening to the History Workshop podcast on ‘Uncovering the Socialist Anthropocene’ with Maja and Reuben Fowkes, where they respond to questions from History Workshop Journal editor Marybeth Hamilton.
What has been the historical relation between socialism and the environment? How did socialist states in the second part of the twentieth century make use of the resources of the natural world? Was their impact broadly destructive, centred on extraction and mastery? To put it more bluntly, did socialism destroy nature? And what can be learnt about that history by drawing on the resources of the visual arts?
Interested in the work of the SAVA Creative Fellows? Read the visual essay by artists Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, who were SAVA Creative Fellows 2022-3, in our special issue of ARTMargins on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts.
)
An entire mountain vanished in the 1950s in the Western Carpathians of Romania. Its uranium-rich rocks were transported by train to be processed into nuclear fuel in Sillamäe, in the former Soviet Union, now Estonia. Some were converted into nuclear warheads. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, those warheads were decommissioned and dismantled. Since 1995, the Megatons to Megawatts economic deal between Russia and the United States has transformed nuclear weapons into electricity, illuminating American homes with energy derived from Soviet warheads. This project traces a shared history of extraction, linking distant places and pasts through the voice of a confused uranium isotope, caught between being energy that is both vital and destructive at the same time. It explores uranium's path as both a mineral and a time traveller, transferring isotopes across geographies, industries, and time scales. https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/2/113/131442/The-Missing-Mountain
Watch a clip of Where Russia Ends (2024), Ukrainian artist and filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski’s contribution to the project as SAVA Creative Fellow (2023-4).
)
The film examines the often-overlooked history of colonialism and environmental destruction in the Russian-occupied territories of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. In 2022, previously unknown film footage was discovered in Kyiv Science Film Studios (Kyivnaukfilm). It documents numerous expeditions that a group of Ukrainian filmmakers undertook in the 1980s to various parts of Siberia and the Far North. This material forms the basis for the reconstruction of the erased history of the numerous imperialist
wars that Russia waged against its later colonies. Where Russia Ends examines the manifold forms of complicity that played a role in this, shedding light on the ideology of exploitation and development of natural resources. https://sava.earth/engenderings/where-russia-ends/?filter=tangerinefilter
Read the interview titled ‘The Sun, the River and the Spirits’ with SAVA Creative Fellow (2024-5) Saodat Ismailova by Maja and Reuben Fowkes in Think Pieces from April 2025.
)
Saodat Ismailova is an Uzbek filmmaker and artist. In her work, she interweaves myths, rituality, and dreams within the tapestry of everyday life, investigating the historically complex and layered culture of Central Asia which stand at the crossroads of diverse material histories and migratory legacies. Her research encompasses the region’s ancestral knowledge and traditional spiritual practices, as well as the modern history of Uzbekistan. In 2022, she showed her video Chillahona at the 59th Venice Biennale and
presented her work Chilltan at documenta 15. From October 2024 to September 2025, she is Creative Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, in the research project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA). https://thinkpieces-review.co.uk/2025/04/10/sun-river-spirits/
You can also listen to episodes from the SAVA podcast series Left to be Desired, in which artists and researchers are invited to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.
)
The Left to be Desired podcast has featured conversations with Austrian artist and activist Oliver Ressler, artist Saodat Ismailova and Lithuanian artists Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas. You can also hear Romanian theorist Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu on the Ecological Socialism of the Future, join a tour of the exhibition Art in the Age of the Anthropocene at KUMU Art Museum in Tallinn with curator Linda Kaljundi, and hear Zheng Bo the politics of plants. Further episodes include a special edition at the Venice Biennale of 2024, a conversation between SAVA Research Fellow (2022-5) Alexander Petrusek with historian of East Germany Mario Bianchini, and a discussion with researcher and curator Lisa Blackmore on art and water cultures in Latin America. We have also been joined by Cuban environmental historian Reinaldo Funes Monzote and artist Ângela Ferreira, to discuss her work on the experimental agriculture of socialist Mozambique.
)