Past’s Futures: Anthropocene or Capitalocene?

The forecasts for the near future of our planet are bleak. We have entered a new geological epoch, according to which human impact has damaged the Earth’s biological systems to the point that mass extinction is now a real possibility. Humanity—and the rest of life with it—is now on the threshold of an ecological collapse that, as scientists state, could result in 75% of Earth’s species becoming extinct in the next 200 years. This new geological epoch has been commonly termed the Anthropocene. However, the Capitalocene—an alternative term to refer to deleterious human activities—has also been proposed by Jason W. Moore.¹ Defining an inseparability between capital, anthropocentric power, and nature, the Capitalocene has triggered global conversations between scholars, activists and artists who have reached a collective agreement: climate change and its effects are not just the outcome of abstract processes, they are consequences of the world’s capitalist functions. The ecological crisis is “capitalogenic”, as Moore points out in his analysis of the last few hundred years of environmental issues.² However, thinking within the post-socialist era, more questions arise. The annexation of Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II has reshaped the face of the land, changed the function of natural environments and caused environmental crises. As philosopher and filmmaker Daniel Ross points out, the communist vision of technological progress, industrialization and urbanization was  highly entropic and stands as an illustration of how human dreams can become nightmares.³ Thus, not surprisingly, in many countries under Soviet rule, ecological thought emerges intertwined with nationalist and anti-governmental sentiments. This having been said, it seems fair to ask, can we apply the term Capitalocene to describe the ecological damage exerted by communist regimes? 

In the post-1989 period, video artists from post-socialist countries started to reflect on the environmental legacy of socialist regimes whilst also addressing degradation caused by neoliberalism. The final part of this screening series provides a context-specific look  at how the Anthropocene and Capitalocene apply in the region. The artists and filmmakers presented in this screening reveal how moving image art from 1989 to the present registers changing attitudes toward the environment and exposes environmental damage caused by both socialist modernization and capitalist industrialization. The films presented here engage with ecological issues related to the times that now mark the failed dreams of East-Central European socialism. The futures assigned to the world in the socialist past are not the futures of the present.

Untitled (Time and Space) by Krzysztof Maniak

The return to nature was one of the eco-critical strategies available to the artists during the socialist times. Re-interpreting this tradition, Krzysztof Maniak’s film Untitled (Time and Space) documents actions performed in the vicinity of Tuchów, a Polish backwater. The simple gestures and actions, performed by the artist in the absence of an audience, include stroking moss, tree bark or snow, climbing trees, and estimating the distance between two trees. These actions are linked to the four seasons.

Bambi in Chernobyl by Angelika Markul

Chernobyl has been a desolate land since the nuclear disaster of 1986. Since then, nature seems to have regained its footing: fauna and flora have developed on the site, slowly invading the ruins of a world abandoned by humans. Angelika Markul’s Bambi in Chernobyl, a film based on footage of the artist’s expedition to the exclusion zone, explores a return to nature that is no longer pristine. As the artist has pointed out, the work is supposed to function like a sculpture, not just a projection. The scenography is important as the elements from the film are replicated in wax, resembling parts of a building from Chernobyl. In this structural film, the past and the future, the East and the West, dreams and reality collide in a lengthy shot of the scene of the nuclear catastrophe, extending the perspective of the devastated and toxic landscape from right to left, and from one end to the other. Markul transforms the image of post-disaster into a world suspended between reality and fiction that awakens childish fears. The film’s  score, composed by Franck Krawczyk, was inspired by Bambi, a Disney classic animation movie. Ironically, it contributes to the oeuvre’s  post-catastrophic imagery which is as familiar as it is uncanny.

Aral. Fishing in an Invisible Sea by Saodat Ismailova

Chernobyl is just one of many sites of ecological disasters that bear environmental memories of the socialist epoch. The Aral Sea is another. Fifty years ago, located on the border between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, the Aral Sea was considered to be the fourth largest lake in the world. Now, it has  almost completely vanished. The desiccation of the Aral Sea started in the early 1960s with the expansion of the cotton industry and Soviet irrigation projects. These changes caused profound ecological damage, including the destruction of native fish species, degradation of biotic communities, and climate change which has affected the former shoreline. The disappearance of the Aral Sea represents an ecological disaster of monumental proportions for both the region’s ecosystems and its human inhabitants. A documentary film by Saodat Ismailova, Aral. Fishing in an Invisible Sea, tells the story of three generations of fishermen in the area around the Aral Sea. The work documents the everyday struggle to survive in one of the harshest places on the planet, emphasizing the disastrous aftermath of human expansionist ambitions. By tracing the invisible and lasting effects of what is considered to be one of the largest  human-caused ecological disasters on the planet, the film questions the failed futures of its recent communist past. 

The Most Beautiful Catastrophe by APART Collective

Another film dealing with the overexploitation and extraction of natural resources is The Most Beautiful Catastrophe by APART Collective. The film, shot in the region of upper Nitra, examines the industry of coal mining and its impact on the living environments. The extraction of coal, initiated during the communist era, still remains one of the main industries in Slovakia despite the growing threat of climate change. The film specifically focuses on the Kosovsko-Laskár wetlands that are located in the Central-Western Slovakia. These wetlands emerged as a by-product of the underground extraction of coal, and are probably the first example of a new landscape to emerge in Slovakia. Mining has changed the territory: large sinkholes have been created, affecting both housing and the natural environment. This environmental impact has forced people to move, forming an unusual habitat as nature finds its balance. But after several years, the situation has worsened. A crisis at the still-operational mine caused water to be discharged from its flooded tunnels up to the surface. As miners began to pump this water into the nearby creek, their skin burned. This mixture, of ash and hydraulic emulsion, managed to kill all life in the creek. The film explores the impact of technological progress on global warming and raises the question of geopolitical writing with the planet, not only about the planet. Here, the past’s futures overlap with the future’s pasts.

Landslide by Oleksiy Radynski

Landslide by Oleksiy Radynski is a film about an attempt to build a radically different society. This experiment takes place in the former garage collective in the very center of Kyiv, in the area reclaimed by nature and its force. Landslides, degradation of urban politics and disintegration of social ties culminated in the abandonment of this place in the 1990s. In 2016, Radynski was among the counterculture artist collectives, musicians and avant-garde performers to re-occupy this place. The protagonists of the film touch upon the old debate between Anarchists and Marxists, of whether one should live one’s utopia right here and now, or create conditions for a better life in the future. A central narrative forms around a queer theater director who has fled the Eastern Ukraine to find refuge in Kyiv. The director rehearses a play that culminates in an improvised performance towards the end of the film. As the narrative of the director unfolds, a different group of inhabitants— an older generation of garage owners—is introduced, advocating a completely different view of the place’s pasts and its potential futures. Gravity, the force that triggers the landslide, becomes a metaphor for this short-lived meeting of urban nature, post-Soviet masculinity and queer performance.

This film program is organized by Inga Lāce and Lukas Brasiskis in collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Lithuanian Culture Institute and Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in New York, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Polish Cultural Institute New York, and Consulate General of the Slovak Republic in New York. The third screening “Past’s Futures: Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” will be available from August 26 to September 9, 2020. You can read about the first screening here and second screening here.

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Specters of Socialist Architecture

Behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union engineered its own version of the modern individual. As social anthropologist Caroline Humphrey has written, “…the fantasy of the socialist infrastructure acquired an overdetermining quality in the Soviet Union in conjunction with the grand industrialization and collectivization programs of the mid-twentieth century”. Wide scale urbanization was one of the most common practices of transformation, leading to the homogenization of socialist everyday life. Urban architecture played a crucial role in this process. The idea of using a residential area for ideological goals was notably prevalent during the Khrushchev era, when the intensive union-wide apartment building program began. As architectural historian Florian Urban points out, political, ideological, social, economic and even technological aspects of architecture were standardized across the Soviet Union in the 1950s and the 1960s. With the advent of large panel prefabricated blockhouse building technology, the housing projects were gradually carried out in every republic of the USSR, and thus, the urban unification of Soviet everyday life influenced large populations.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the socialist housing projects no longer performed their primary ideological function. While some still accommodate millions of people, others  rest in a desolate state. Some have sought to change their profile to adapt to capitalist realities. Stripped of its ideological frame, the specter of socialist architecture nevertheless retains its influence on the geographic, social and cultural landscape of post-socialist life. With the shift to a capitalist system, concepts like development and gentrification have entered the vocabularies of urban development. Today, these hybrid views towards architecture entangle political contexts, ecological consciousness, and the economic progress of the region. The video artworks in this section focus on Soviet architectural infrastructure and its impact on the environment, as well as envisioning its potential future.

A Place (Playground) by Krassimir Terziev

Just as standard residential buildings were designed to synchronize the daily lives of the New Soviet individual, so were the playgrounds and leisure parks that were built next to these apartment buildings. A Place (Playground) (2004) by Krassimir Terziev focuses on one of the playgrounds situated in a typical working-class neighborhood, built in 1983 in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. The environment recorded on video is characteristic of a concoction of preplanned hillocks that are cut across by canals and ponds which are linked by curved footbridges. Terziev highlights the architectural ensemble characteristic of prop-like tanks, rockets, military airplanes and canons—all arranged as if on a battlefield. The metal items painted in the same colors—yellow, red and blue—were manufactured from the materials used in the production of military equipment. Importantly, the film turns to the environment as metaphor, as it documents everyday activities in a space packed with residents who are unaware of the changing ideologies behind their urban surroundings, as communist ideology gradually gives way to capitalist consumerism.

Pirimze by Sophia Tabatadze

Sophia Tabatadze’s creative documentary Pirimze (2015) is another retrospective research study of the socialist architecture vis-a-vis its gradual environmental alterations. This film focuses on social and visual changes affecting Pirimze, a six-floor building  from the Soviet era, once built in Tbilisi to house repair and maintenance services. Tabatadze chooses to narrate the story from the perspective of the building, giving it a character, but also subtly emphasizing the social importance of non-human infrastructural objects in the changing ecosystem of the city. The theme unfolds into a broader picture that reveals the socio-political changes that have happened in Georgia in the recent decades.

As Pirimze emphasizes, the imposed homogeneity of the Soviet everyday was by no means a given phenomenon but rather an aspiration for Soviet architectural projects.  Different nations in the USSR had different cultural and political histories. For some time, the repressive mechanisms and everyday practices functioned as if these differences were non-existent, or at least completely insignificant. But these differences became more notable, until eventually, and inevitably, they came to the fore in the 1980s. It was at this time that  architecture ceased to play its prescribed role. The breakdown of the function of Soviet urban infrastructure is particularly visible when looking at the specters of Soviet architectural projects.

Four Edges of Pyramiden by Ieva Epnere

Ieva Epnere in Four Edges of Pyramiden (2015) focuses on one of these specters. The ex-Soviet mining town Pyramiden, built on the archipelago of Svalbard, stopped functioning in the late 1980s and was finally deserted in 1998, leaving behind a number of empty residential buildings, an abandoned library, and a desolate cultural center that all together form a ghostly memory of life from the socialist past. Svalbard, historically known as no-man’s land, was used for mining natural resources during the Soviet era. As a result, the natural environment of the area has been  altered. After the Soviet Union collapsed however, Svalbard—one of the northernmost places in the world’—has metamorphosed again and become a destination for researchers, escapists and adventurous passersby. In this film, Ieva Epnere performatively presents four human stories about the present state of this spectral place that both implicitly and explicitly reveal previously forgotten non-human worlds.

Concrete and Unclear by fantastic little splash

fantastic little splash, a collective of investigative artists from Ukraine continues to trace the connection between the past and the present as seen through the architectural structures erected in the Soviet times. Concrete and Unclear (2018) is a documentary short film devoted to the Hotel “Parus” in Dnipro, Ukraine. Hotel “Parus”, which was meant to be a grand symbol of Dnipropetrovsk,the homeland of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, never opened— its construction was halted on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union. This unfinished building became one of the symbols of the city and started to function as a matrix for a spectrum of the present concerns. The hotel symbolizes the impossibility of Soviet claims, the domination of private capital, and the pro-Ukrainian mood of the inhabitants of the eastern city. Hotel “Parus” has become a space of imagination that opposes reality and at the same time reproduces it.

Client’s Day by Flo Kasearu

Flo Kasearu’s Client’s day (2020), the most recent video through which we encounter the specters of the socialist architecture, demonstrates the potential of the ruins of a prefabricated panel block house, located on the fringe of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, just minutes away from the sea. The film reveals the process of gentrification as it reaches the city. It also reflects on the role played by artists within this process, as they are usually the first ones to arrive to previously derelict areas, only to be later ousted  as the spaces acquire higher market value and become too expensive to rent. In this video, the real estate broker speaks about the future as present, ignoring the actual present and the artists who are there at the moment, since they are often seen as temporary residents. Another issue the video tackles is the tension between erecting new buildings and rehabilitating old ones. The 1980s panel block architecture depicted in the video used to be considered ugly. However, as the video ironically points out, it may become more and more appealing as gentrification continues and views on the sustainable development of cities change.

This film program is organized by Inga Lāce and Lukas Brasiskis in collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Lithuanian Culture Institute and Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in New York, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Polish Cultural Institute New York, and Consulate General of the Slovak Republic in New York. The third screening “Past’s Futures: Anthropocene or Capitalocene?” will be available from August 26 to September 9, 2020. You can read about the first screening here.

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Energy: Ideology, Capital and Data

Environmental impacts are closely related to the modes of energy production and transport involving both the systems of supply of energy and pollution created by emissions. Construction of immense supply networks are often used to  distribute capital and/or spread the ideology through instigation of alliances and interdependencies between countries and whole regions. A telling recent example is the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is almost completed by Gazprom, has increased tension between Russia, the US, and Europe. The project linking Russia and Germany directly via the Baltic seabed would not only ensure Russia’s dominance of energy supplies to Europe, but also be ecologically harmful. However, most of the criticism facing the Nord Stream 2 project comes from a geopolitical, rather than an ecological perspective. The pipeline project presents itself as an environmentally friendly initiative that will help decrease carbon emissions from oil and coal, using ‘cleaner’ natural gas, but as the writer and filmmaker Oleksiy Radinsky mentions in his recent essay, it “would increase the structural, long-term dependency on fossil fuels to such an extent that a transition to a carbon-free economy—something that the Earth’s biosphere needs much earlier than we plan to institute—might actually never occur.”¹

Energy Lithuania. 2018. Deimantas Narkevičius

To better understand the genealogy of the politics of energy in the region one should start by looking at the infrastructures from the socialist times. Deimantas Narkevičius’ Energy Lithuania (2000) is a portrait of the present of Elektrėnai, an industrial city that was erected by the Soviets in 1960 to support the newly built electric power station. Back in time, the city was presented as a symbol of modernization and drew people from different Soviet Republics to work there. The film mixes documentary footage from the Soviet era newsreels with newly shot observational material reflecting a long-term impact of ideology. Through interviews, the emphasis is put on the connection between subjective memories of the city’s inhabitants and the actual functioning of the power station. The lines between reality and illusion, documentary and fiction are intentionally blurred to make a statement about interconnections between social and environmental responsibility.

After Scarcity. 2018. Bahar Noorizadeh

Revealing a broader network of links between the economy, data and the energy politics of the socialist times, the sci-fi film essay After Scarcity (2018) by Bahar Noorizadeh focuses on Soviet cyberneticians (1950s – 1980s) and their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. How can one use computation towards new utopias? If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, by revisiting contingent histories of economic technology After Scarcity  enables a glance to the future. While the Stalinists opposed cybernetics, cyberneticians like Victor Glushkov rose to prominence in the 1960s as increasing bureaucratic demands of the centrally planned economy threatened to turn the Soviet Union into a highly administrative state. Networked computation held the promise of a new cyber-infrastructures and automated a national economy that would decentralize central planning. The flashing, affective light, hyper intense material sound and fast-paced screen text keep the spectator’s body on high alert. Advocating for the “other internet”, the film muses on the economic applications of socialist cybernetic experiments as an extraordinary comparison to financial arrangements and imaginaries of energy structures in capitalist countries.

Energy Island. 2017. Emilija Škarnulytė

Energy Island (2017) by Emilija Škarnulytė takes us back to contemporary Lithuania via an immersive sensorial trip through the Soviet-built Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, currently undergoing a politically and ecologically motivated decommissioning process. The images of contaminated ruins transform in the fire, light and shadow. The destruction of the huge infrastructure consistently reveals that the Cold War energy structures have impact on recent geopolitical processes and leave planetary threats over long periods of time. The project takes a geological approach, reading the elements that compose this flat landscape as a stack of stratigraphic layers. The human­-made space is understood as a sedimentary process and the infrastructures, as well as the mineral resources, are assessed as the key parameters defining the development of the project. The second part of the film features a new energy structure — a sea carrier “Independence” designed as a floating liquefied natural gas storage and regasification unit.  Built by Hyundai in South Korea, the vessel started operating in the autumn of 2014. It can store 6,000,000 cu ft of natural gas and can supply all of Lithuania’s need for natural gas providing some diversification of Lithuanian gas imports away from Russia. Almost tongue-in-cheek, the film compares the old energy structures to the new ones, erasing the dividing lines between the socialist and the capitalist logic of extraction and supply.

Pond Battery. 2015. Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits

Pond Battery (2015) by Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits visualizes more contemporary ways of energy production. The electric sound intervenes the seemingly idyllic landscape after the artists installed six microbial fuels in the pond of the Botanical Garden of the University of Latvia in Riga. Images of the measurements of bacteria’ electrical fluctuations were used to make the invisible activity visible and audible. A process of the generation of electricity was translated into live sound and image structures, providing an aesthetic perspective on the interaction between nature and technology, ecological systems and electronic networks, human and micro-worlds. The collected data from the seven-month long observation period is the footage and sound for the structural film and creates a sensual and emotional experience—a poetics of green energy.

The Flood. 2018. Ivar Veermäe

Despite the emergence of new yet very rarely used possibilities for energy production, the ecological crisis pertains. The Flood (2018) by Ivar Veermäe touches upon the cryptocurrency mining that is inseparable from the environmental damage exerted by the intense use of electricity needed to carry out the process. The film is based on the footage shot in various cryptocurrency mines in Estonia combined with footage from Estonian oil shale mines. Virtual currency, such as Bitcoins, offer an attempt to withdraw from the existing financial system, because it offers the idea to release money production from the central bank’s control. Every utopian idea is inevitably accompanied by the risk that new centers or “bubbles” could arise. Small crypto mines are being replaced by increasingly bigger ones. Despite that some Estonian crypto mines are located in the territories of ex-power stations, this does a huge environmental damage because of the vast demand for energy needed to mine virtual currencies. 

This film program is organized by Inga Lāce and Lukas Brasiskis in collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Lithuanian Culture Institute and Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in New York, Consulate General of Estonia in New York, Polish Institute, and Consulate General of the Slovak Republic in New York.

The second screening “Post Scriptum of Socialist Architecture” will be available from August 12 to August 26 and the last screening “Past’s Futures: Anthropocene or Capitalocene ” from August 26 to September 9, 2020.

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