SAVA Panel Discussion: Landscapes of the Socialist Anthropocene

Zeta Contemporary Art Centre, Tirana

13 June 2025, 6-7.30 pm 

The SAVA Panel Discussion: Landscapes of the Socialist Anthropocene, emerging from a collaboration with Zeta Contemporary Art Centre in Tirana, will feature an introduction to the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts project by Maja and Reuben Fowkes (SAVA UCL), along with presentations by Raino Isto (University of Maryland) and Jonida Gashi (Academy of Sciences of Albania). 

Introduction to the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts

Maja and Reuben Fowkes (SAVA UCL)

An introduction to the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA), a visual arts led interdisciplinary research project that challenges the West-centric discourses of the Anthropocene by asserting the constitutive role of the environmental histories of Socialism in the formation of new geological times.

“The Onrush of Socialist Realism”: The Ideological and Cultural Revolution and the Transformations of Albanian Socialist Art in the late 1960s and early 1970s

Raino Isto (University of Maryland)

This talk explores the new methods that emerged and critical discussions that took place in Albanian Socialist Realist art during the final years of the 1960s decade and the first years of the 1970s. 

The representation of nature as part of the class struggle in Vitet e para (Kristaq Dhamo, 1965)

Jonida Gashi (Academy of Sciences of Albania)

Released in 1965, on the eve of Albania’s Ideological and Cultural Revolution, Kristaq Dhamo’s film Vitet e para (The First Years) is a fictionalized account of one of the most ambitious industrialization projects undertaken by the Albanian Communist Party after it seized power at the end of World War II.