Left to Be Desired Episode 9: Mario Bianchini

Episode 9 of the SAVA podcast Left to Be Desired features a conversation between SAVA Research Fellow Alexander Petrusek and Mario Bianchini, Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam.  

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.  

Mario Bianchini: Utopia, Entropy, and the GDR’s Socialist Anthropocene 

Recorded in the heart of the former East German capital of Berlin, episode 9 of Left to Be Desired is a conversation between SAVA Research Fellow Alexander Petrusek and Mario Bianchini, Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam. Alexander and Mario, both historians of ideals and utopia in East Germany, discuss the evolution of scientific-technological utopia in the 1960s, its influence over the socialist imaginary of the decade, and how practicing this utopia in part devastated the country’s environment in the 1970s and 1980s. Alexander and Mario also examine alternatives to growth-first economics that arose from the GDR’s ecological crisis, as well as the activist circles who sought to practice them from within, and through, the Socialist Anthropocene.

About the Speakers

Mario Bianchini  

Mario Bianchini is a research fellow at the Potsdam Leibniz-Center for Contemporary Historical Research (ZZF), where his research focuses on the history of technology, utopia, and energy in East and West Germany. His work has appeared in Science, Technology, and Human Values and German Studies Review. His first book manuscript, Real Existing Utopia, is soon to be completed. 

Alexander Petrusek 

Alexander Petrusek is a historian of modern Germany, the environment, and the global Cold War. He is a SAVA Research Fellow at PACT, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. His research has included investigating East German support for the Namibian independence movement during the Border War in southern Africa, and how the East German practices of solidarity criticized, and at times uncomfortably reflected, the South African state's self-designated 'civilizing mission' in Namibia and its underlying exploitative extractivism.