SAVA Conference 2026
SOLIDARITY WITH NATURE: ENVISIONING THE ECOLOGICAL HERITAGE OF WORLD SOCIALISM
21-22 May 2026
Sainsbury Art Centre Lecture Theatre
University of East Anglia
www.sava.earth
The SAVA Conference on Solidarity with Nature asks how art history could be unlocked as a repository of the ecological heritage of socialism, explores the role of art practitioners in environmental movements, and considers how experimental art practices performed beyond-human solidarities and expanded the system’s ecological horizons.
Conference registration is free of charge, but please email sava@uea.ac.uk to let us know that you plan to attend.
PROGRAMME
Thursday 21 May
09.45 Conference registration
10.00 Introduction to the Socialist Anthropocene
The SAVA Team
PANEL I: NATURE PROTECTION
Chaired by Maja Fowkes (SAVA UEA)
10.30 Daniel Grúň (Institute of Art History, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava)
Ecological Solidarity and Planetary Thought: Activist–Artist Interactions in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
11.00 Megija Mīlberga (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
“Where will you sleep? Under the spruce!” The Great-Tree Liberation Group and counterpublic environmentalism in Soviet Latvia
11.30 Preeti Kathuria (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna)
Stubble Burning and Rural Ecologies: Contemporary Artistic Interventions in India
12.00 Discussion
12.30 Lunch
PANEL II: SYSTEM ECOLOGIES
Chaired by Meg Bernstein (UEA)
13.30 Anna Pronina (Central European University, Vienna)
Seeing the Socialist Subtropics in Soviet Uzbekistan
14.00 Nikola Bojić (Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb)
Diagramming the Socialist Anthropocene
14.30 Peter Szalay (Comenius University Bratislava)
Between Pannaturalistic Socialism and Degrowth
15.00 Discussion
15.30 Coffee break
PANEL III: ENVIRONMENTAL PRAXES
Chaired by Reuben Fowkes (SAVA UEA)
16.00 Pavlína Morganová (Academy of Fine Arts, Prague)
Out of Town – Land Art and ordinary Life in Czechoslovakia in 1970s
16.30 Tihomir Topuzovski (Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje)
De/Territorializing Nature: Socio-Ecological Assemblages in Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Contexts
17.00 Dominicus Zimanimoto Makukula (University of Dar es Salaam)
‘Ujamaa’ Art Remnants in Tanzania: A Critical Review of Selected Murals and Monuments in Dar es Salaam
17.30 Discussion
18.00 End
Friday 22 May
10.00 Ethereal Ecologies: Socialist Anthropocene of the Sky
Maja and Reuben Fowkes (SAVA UEA)
PANEL IV: ANTHROPOCENE COSMOLOGIES
Chaired by Sorcha Thomson (SAVA UEA)
10.30 Lia Dostlieva (artist, cultural anthropologist, and essayist)
Soviet Anthropocene 1933
11.00 Christian Sorace (University of Cambridge) & Rebecca Empson (UCL)
Lenin on the Steppe: Ecologies of Infinity
11.30 Anel Rakhimzhanova (New York University)
18,000 Worlds: Towards a Theory of Re-montage
12.00 Discussion
12.30 Lunch
PANEL V: ECO-SPIRTUALIST TENDENCIES
Chaired by Makar Tereshin (SAVA UEA)
13.30 Eva Skopalová (National Gallery, Prague)
Bird in Space: Sculpture and Ecological Imagination in 1960s Czechoslovakia
14.00 Shirin Melikova (Azerbaijan National Museum of Art, Baku)
Non-conformist Art and the Ecological Critique of Late Socialism in Azerbaijan
14.30 Cristian Nae (George Enescu National University of the Arts, Iasi)
Of Earth and Plants: Ecological Posthumanism in Romanian Art of the 1980s
15.00 Discussion
15.30 Coffee break
PANEL VI: ECOCENTRIC IMAGINARIES
Chaired by Marleen Boschen (Tate Modern)
16.00 Ng Mei Jia (NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore)
The Socialist Word for Freedom is (Mangrove) Forest
16.30 Ingrid Ruudi (Institute of Art History, Estonian Academy of Arts)
Vaike Lubi and her 'stick palaces': eco-feminist crip resistance in Late Soviet Estonia
17.00 Joanna Sokołowska (University of Wrocław)
Socialist Pasts for Planetary Futures: Art as a Cosmopolitical Practice in Post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe
For abstracts and speaker biographies please see:
https://sava.earth/conference/solidarity-with-nature-envisioning-the-ecological-heritage-of-world-socialism/
This conference is organised within the framework of the research project Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) led by Dr. Maja Fowkes at the School of History and Art History, University of East Anglia, supported by European Research Council (ERC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).