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Left to Be Desired

Left to Be Desired

By: Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts
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 'Left to Be Desired' is a podcast by Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) research project. Research leaders, Maja & Reuben Fowkes, invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene. 'Left to Be Desired' explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global Socialism. Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) sets out to radically transform current critical debates around the Anthropocene, addressing the major lacuna in existing accounts by establishing the Socialist Anthropocene as a conceptual framework that asserts the constitutive role of the environmental histories and potentialities of Socialism in the formation of the new geological age. The project is led by Dr. Maja Fowkes, based at the School of History and Art History at the University of East Anglia, and funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK government's Horizon Europe funding guarantee.2023 Art
Episodes
  • Left to Be Desired Episode 12: Ângela Ferreira

    Left to Be Desired Episode 12: Ângela Ferreira
    May 21 2025
    Episode 12 of the SAVA podcast Left to Be Desired features a conversation with artist and researcher Ângela Ferreira. Left to Be Desired is available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and Audacy. You can also access it via the podcast website:   https://lefttobedesired.libsyn.com/site   Left to Be Desired explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene. Ângela Ferreira Continuing our exploration of global perspectives on the Socialist Anthropocene, in this episode of Left to Be Desired, Maja and Reuben Fowkes talk to artist and researcher Ângela Ferreira about her work on revolutionary Mozambique. We learn that the artist's main focus is on the first post-independence years, when the government opted for a tolerant form of socialism that was open to forms of creative experimentation, before the adoption of the Soviet model of social and political organization. The podcast includes discussion of Ferreira's collaborative project Experimental Field (2024), which explores the material and archival residues, as well as the social and environmental dimensions, of the radical agrarian practices developed at a university agricultural laboratory in the 1970s. About the Speaker Ângela Ferreira  Ângela Ferreira  is an artist and researcher teaching Fine Art at the University of Lisbon (FBAUL) in Portugal and in Mozambique. Ferreira's multi-disciplinary practice is concerned with the ongoing impact of colonialism and post-colonialism on contemporary society, an investigation that is conducted through in-depth research and distillation of ideas into concise and resonant forms. The contribution of this artistic practice lies in the construction of a solid and non-pamphleteering artistic decolonial discourse. The source of her archival reference materials often triangulates the three countries of her personal history: South Africa, Mozambique and Portugal, which she represented Portugal at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.
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    25 mins
  • Left to Be Desired Episode 11: Reinaldo Funes Monzote

    Left to Be Desired Episode 11: Reinaldo Funes Monzote
    May 14 2025
    Episode 11 of the SAVA podcast Left to Be Desired features a conversation with Reinaldo Funes Monzote conducted by Maja and Reuben Fowkes and Sorcha Thomson. Left to Be Desired is available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and Audacy. You can also access it via the podcast website: https://lefttobedesired.libsyn.com/site Left to Be Desired podcast explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global Socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes will invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene. Reinaldo Funes Monzote This episode of Left to be Desired engages Reinaldo Funes Monzote in conversation on the environmental history of Cuba and its place in the Socialist Anthropocene. Maja and Reuben Fowkes, joined by SAVA Research Fellow Sorcha Thomson, discuss with Reinaldo his work on the different eras of Cuban environmental transformation - from the entangled processes of deforestation and sugar cultivation since 1492 to the projects of geotransformación after the 1959 Revolution and what they tell us about attitudes to nature under Cuban socialism. The conversation reflects on the impact of the end of the Soviet Union on Cuba in the 1990s and how the need to find new means of survival shaped eco-socialist and agroecological initiatives. In tracing these histories, Reinaldo complicates binary visions of the ecological imprint of socialist Cuba, instead highlighting an adaptability of Cuban approaches to the environment since the Revolution, with variable ecological impacts, in relation to the shifting conditions and legacies of colonial extraction, imperial exploitation, and global socialism that have shaped the Caribbean island. About the Speaker Reinaldo Funes Monzote Reinaldo Funes Monzote is a Professor of History at the University of Havana and Coordinator of the Geo-Historical Research Program at the Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation in Cuba. He has held visiting professorships at universities in Spain, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and the US, and has been a Fellow at Princeton's Davis Center for Historical Studies and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Reinaldo is also a member of the Academy of History of Cuba and President of the Cuban Society for the History of Science and Technology.
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    48 mins
  • Left to Be Desired Episode 10: Lisa Blackmore

    Left to Be Desired Episode 10: Lisa Blackmore
    May 2 2025

    Episode 10 of the SAVA podcast Left to be Desired features a conversation with Lisa Blackmore, researcher, curator and educator working with art and water cultures in Latin America.

     Left to Be Desired is available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music/Audible and Audacy. You can also access it via the podcast website: 

    https://lefttobedesired.libsyn.com/site 

    Left to Be Desired explores the distinctiveness of the socialist path through the Anthropocene by bringing together artistic and scholarly insights into the ecologies of global socialism. Maja & Reuben Fowkes invite artists and researchers to talk about their practice and exchange ideas at the intersection of ecology, climate change, art and the Socialist Anthropocene.

    Lisa Blackmore on Troubled Waters

    This episode of Left to be Desired seeks points of reference and comparison between the Anthropocene histories of Latin America and the environmental transformation of Europe and Central Asia during the socialist period. Lisa Blackmore shares insights into the brutal hydroforming of the rivers of Sao Paulo, and the dramatic consequences of paving over, channelizing and even inverting the flow of its liquid arteries through flash floods made more frequent and perilous by climate breakdown. The conversation with Maja and Reuben Fowkes also explores the ways in which artists have sought to restore connections with hydro-worlds and engage with post-human aqueous ontologies. While eco-socialist approaches can be identified in localized forms of hydrocommoning that incorporate post-human, biocentric and spiritual approaches to land and water, "degrowth is not on the table" in systems governed by extractive capitalism.

    About the Speaker

    Lisa Blackmore is a researcher, curator and educator, working with art and water cultures in Latin America. Since 2018, she has been directing entre—ríos, a platform whose collaborative methodologies (re)connect diverse communities to bodies of water through curatorial, editorial and pedagogical projects. She is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK. In 2023, she was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow for her project "Imagining the Hydrocommons: Art, Water and Infrastructure in Latin America." Her recent publications include "Water" in Handbook to Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (2023) and the co-edited volume Hydrocommons Cultures: Art, Pedagogy and Care Practices in the Americas (2024). https://lisablackmore.net/
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    27 mins
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