Visions of Ecology

Visions of Ecology on Art and the Environment in Eastern Europe and Eurasia Lecture Series 2022-2023

VISIONS OF ECOLOGY IS A YEAR-LONG SERIES ON ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN EASTERN EUROPE AND EURASIA, SUPPORTED BY THE RUSSIAN, EAST EUROPEAN, AND EURASIAN STUDIES PROGRAM AT THE WHITNEY AND BETTY MACMILLAN CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL AND AREA STUDIES AT YALE UNIVERSITY.

Watch video recordings on the Yale European Studies Council YouTube chanel.

Dr. Victoria Donovan is a Senior Lecturer in Russian and Director of the Centre for Russian, Soviet, Central and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews. Her current research is on the industrial history and heritage of the Ukrainian East, also known as Donbas, questions of heritage management and manipulation and the role of the industrial past in forming community identities and politics. Donovan is the co-author with Darya Tsymbalyuk of Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics and Donbas (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2022), and co-editor with Iryna Sklokina of Donbas Imaginaries: Heritage, Culture, and Community, a special collection published with REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia in 2021. Before she began her research in Ukraine, she worked on Russian cultural nationalism and heritage politics in the historic northwest of the country. Her monograph, Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism and Identity in the Russian Northwest was published with NIUP imprint at Cornell in 2019.  Donovan’s current research engages with the public, civic and engaged humanities, and her methodological writing in this area has been published in Modern Languages Open and is forthcoming in 2023 with Canadian Slavonic Papers. Victoria’s research and knowledge transfer work has been recognised with prestigious national prizes and grants, including an Arts and Humanities Leadership Fellowship, British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker award. Her new book Monotown: Tales of Resistance from the Ukrainian East will be published by Daunt Books Publishing in 2024.

Watch video recording on the Yale European Studies Council YouTube chanel. Read event recap on the Yale REEES website.

Linda Kaljundi is a historian and curator, Professor of Cultural history at Estonian Academy of Arts and Senior Research Fellow at Tallinn University in the framework of the research project “Estonian environmentalism in the long twentieth century”. She has published and edited a number of texts on medieval and early modern history and historiography, cultural memory and nation building in the Baltic region, as well as the history of environment and scientific illustration. In addition, she has curated exhibitions examining the role of visual culture in the constructions of identity, memory, and colonialism. She also is a member of KAJAK, Estonian Centre for Environmental History.

 

Lukas Brasiskis is an associate curator of film at e-flux. He holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and is an adjunct lecturer at NYU and CUNY/Brooklyn College. His scholarly and curatorial interests include eco-media and eco-film (with a focus on the potentials and limitations of mediation of the ecological crisis), world cinema within and beyond the modernist canon, histories of experimental film, aesthetics and infrastructures of the artists’ moving-image and intersections between cinema and contemporary art worlds

 

Pavel Borecký (Prague, 1986) is a social anthropologist, audiovisual ethnographer and film curator. His latest films “Solaris” (2015) and “In the Devil’s Garden” (2018) focused on Estonia’s consumption culture and decolonization in the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, respectively. In 2020, Pavel finished the feature ecographic documentary on the unfolding water crisis in Jordan. “Living Water” later travelled to film festivals such as Ji.hlava, Movies that Matter, DokuFest, Visions du Réel and CPH:DOX.

 

Watch video recording on the Yale European Studies Council YouTube chanel. Read event recap on the Yale REEES website.

 

---

EVENT #2: SWEET RUINS: INFRASTRUCTURES OF THE SOCIALIST ANTHROPOCENE | THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2022, 12:00pm ET

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?

Dr. Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the 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. www.translocal.org