The Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) project reconstructs the environmental histories of twentieth-century socialism by analysing historical artworks and engaging with contemporary art practices. Current debates about the Anthropocene—the geological epoch defined by human impact on the planet—overwhelmingly focus on Western industrial capitalism. This leaves a major gap: the environmental transformations driven by socialist states, from the Soviet Union to China and Eastern Europe, remain largely unexamined. SAVA addresses this by establishing the "Socialist Anthropocene" as a new conceptual framework, arguing that socialist extractivism, infrastructure, and agricultural collectivisation were constitutive forces in shaping the planet. If successful, the project will fundamentally challenge the West-centric narrative of environmental change. It could reshape how historians, policymakers, and environmental scientists understand the global drivers of climate change, resource extraction, and biodiversity loss. The research is primarily curiosity-driven, aiming to generate new cross-disciplinary paradigms rather than immediate practical applications. However, deeper understanding of socialist environmental legacies could inform future international climate agreements and development strategies, particularly in regions where socialist-era infrastructure still operates.
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The SAVA project sets out to radically transform current debates on the Anthropocene, addressing the major lacuna in existing accounts by establishing the Socialist Anthropocene as a novel conceptual framework that asserts the constitutive role of the twentieth century environmental histories of socialism in the formation of the new geological age. It is the first large-scale interdisciplinary research project that institutes the Socialist Anthropocene as a new field of study within the critical corpus concerned with challenging and decentring the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene. The research is organised around five thematic streams through which the distinctiveness, epistemologies, relationalities and potentialities of the Socialist Anthropocene will be 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, which entails analysing historical artworks and engaging with contemporary art practices that 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 and identify the potentialities of the Socialist Anthropocene. SAVA also 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.
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