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 (REEES) program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. The series is convened by Molly Brunson, Associate Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures and History of Art, who also serves as Faculty Director of REEES. The series is co-organized by Barbora Bartunkova, PhD Candidate in History of Art, and Elena Adasheva-Klein, PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology.
For the third event in the series on February 9, 2023, a panel of art historians, curators, and artists discussed Eastern European environmental art. The panel included Linda Kaljundi, historian and curator, Professor of Cultural History at the Estonian Academy of Arts and Senior Research Fellow at Tallinn University; Lukas Brasiskis, associate curator of film at e-flux and lecturer at NYU and CUNY/Brooklyn College; and Pavel Borecký, social anthropologist, audiovisual ethnographer, and film curator.
Linda Kaljundi opened the panel with a presentation titled, “De-provincializing Environmentalism in Eastern European Art (History) – The Case of Soviet Estonia.” She began by addressing broad issues around the globalization of environmental art history which for a very long time has been centered around a Western context. Today, new histories of art and the environment pay more attention to the Global South and the socialist world. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, discussions around decolonizing Eastern European art history have also called for the moving away from a Russo- or Soviet-centric approach, in order to give more agency and visibility to what had been considered a ‘periphery.’ Kaljundi’s presentation drew from two sources: first, her research for the project on Estonian environmentalism in the twentieth century and, second, collective research for the exhibition, “Art in the Age of the Anthropocene,” which will open in May 2023 at the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. This curatorial initiative aims to rethink Estonian art history from the 19th century to the present from an eco-critical perspective. Kaljundi points out that Eastern European scholars, such as Viktor Pál, have argued against the ecocide narrative, promoted by Western scholars working in the socialist context. Many Eastern European scholars highlight, instead, environmentalist efforts in Eastern Europe, particularly during the late Soviet period, and therefore resist writing the history of environmentalism from the late 1960s onwards around Western models and examples. For instance, in her book Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (1996), British historian Jane Dawson argues that environmental activism of the Perestroika period is really a fight for national self-determination. In contrast, environmental historians from Eastern Europe take local environmental efforts seriously. Kaljundi demonstrated how changing attitudes toward the environment were reflected in Soviet Estonian visual culture of the 1970s-1980s. First, traditional painting moved away from the depiction of nature’s beauty while the motif of an ambiguous, poisonous, dangerous matter entered the works of art from this period. Kaljundi explained these changes by the anxieties around body, health, and pollution. Second, the idealization of industry and industrial agriculture of the Stalinist and post-war periods also faded away in the 1970s-1980s. She considered the artistic critique of consumerism, urbanization, petroculture, and technology as not specifically Eastern European but rather transnational. Kaljundi showed how irony, absurdity, and surrealism characterized the visual language, utilized by local artists for criticizing industrial traditions. Finally, global networks and Estonian visual culture were shown to be linked in the Talinn Declaration on Fine Art and Photography (1983), which promoted natural conservation.
After Kaljundi, Lukas Brasiskis presented a talk titled, “Anthropocene Visuality in Times after Nature: A Case Study of Acid Forest.” Brasiskis discussed how, against the backdrop of environmental crisis, eco-critical or eco-conscious art, conceptualized as “Anthropocene visuality,” gained relevance, including in film and video. In the last decade, the genre of observational documentary with a distinctive camera positioning became a strategy for capturing the images of disastrous landscapes on a large scale. An example of such a style is the documentary film by Nicholas de Pencier, Edward Burtynsky, and Jennifer Baichwal, Anthropocene Project. Visual culture theorists Nicholas Mirzoeff and TJ Demos criticize an “Anthropocene visuality” that aestheticizes natural disasters and anesthetizes our senses of them. They propose to reject this visualization of the Anthropocene scale, primarily because this visuality cannot be fully universal or neutral, instead always expressing a certain position of power. Mirzoeff and TJ Demos invite us to think about alternative visualities of Anthropocene, or “countervisualities,” that critically engage not only with the aftermath of the crisis, but also with the way humans perceive and deal with it. Brasiskis proposed considering the film by Lithuanian filmmaker Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Acid Forest, as an example of such an alternative Anthropocene visuality. This film depicts a forest at the UNESCO heritage site on the Curonian Spit, which is thought of as slowly being destroyed by the migrated cormorants. In contrast with observational films, this work creates an opposition to the common point of view, offering a non-human (bird’s) perspective. The bird’s point of view does not allow human spectators to have the privilege of looking at and feeling in control of a destroyed nature. According to Brasiskis, this film illustrates the potential for alternative Anthropocene visuality that is based not on entanglements with power but on creative reflections on human/non-human connections.
The third panelist Pavel Borecký spoke about his experience of making a sensory ethnographic film Solaris (2015) in a talk titled, “Tuning Solaris: From the Darkness of a Shopping Mall Towards Post-Humanist Cinema.” Borecký’s article with the same title (2016) in Visual Ethnography Journal outlined theoretical frameworks for what he called an “emerging post-humanist cinema.” In his own film Solaris, the central aim was to evoke human and non-human entities as interacting and equally contributing to the “mallness” of the in-between space of a Tallinn shopping mall. In order to “unhumanize” the experiencing of the mall and enter a “state of extreme listening,” the soundscape of Solaris excludes the dialogue. As a filmmaker, Borecký together with his collaborator, musician and sonic ethnographer Kevin Molloy, embraces ambiguity, half-knowledge, and uncertainty with the goal of challenging Western theories of causality and experiences of modern human worlds. They aim to provide experiences that would be “regenerative rather than just descriptive.” Borecký referred to the technologies of miniature contact microphones, GoPro and nano cameras, which allow for experimentations with the cinema of proximity. He invited new methodologies that move beyond human-centered cinema. First, he suggested the development of a post-humanist cinema that escapes the notion of aesthetics as a matter of beauty. Here, Borecký follows German philosopher Gernot Böhme, discussing new aesthetics concerned with “the relation between environmental qualities and human states.” Second, drawing from the concept of relationality and posthuman critical theory, he proposed the experimentation with “immersiveness” through a meticulous exploration of the world.
During the discussion period, the panelists explored a number of questions about the relation between academic research and artistic production, the practices of sensory filmmaking, and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene era.
Watch video recording on the Yale European Studies Council YouTube chanel.