Ilona Nemeth: Eastern Sugar

Description

A look, through the work of Ilona Nemeth, at the transitioning social and economic infrastructure of Eastern Europe. A look, through the work of Ilona Nemeth, at the transitioning social and economic infrastructure of Eastern Europe. Eastern Sugar was the name chosen by Generale Sucri re and Tate & Lyle for their joint venture to acquire sugar factories across Central Europe after the fall of communism in 1989. In the mid-2000s, the Franco-British consortium cashed in its investment to take advantage of a European Union compensation scheme and permanently shut down its sites. This book takes as its starting point artist Ilona Nemeth's extensive research into the history of sugar production in the region, from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, when northern sugar beet emerged as a competitor to southern sugar cane, to the social impact of the rapid decline of the industry in the era of peak globalization. The fate of Eastern Sugar is explored as a microcosm of the mechanisms of postcommunist transition across Central Europe from the opportunism of financial speculators to the endemic corruption of privatization, posing the question of whether neoliberal marketization was the only viable exit strategy from state socialism. Contributions dealing with the social and environmental legacies of Caribbean sugar plantations situate the sugar histories of Eastern Europe within the spread of a monocultural system based on (neo)colonial extractivism. Through critical texts, conversations, and artistic interventions, Ilona Nemeth- Eastern Sugar restores complexity to the history of the rapid decline of the Slovak sugar industry, and by extension the wider social and economic infrastructure of transition in Central Europe, while at the same time opening up planetary trajectories for postcapitalist alternatives. Contributors Edit Andras, Fedor Blas_x010D_ak and Rado Ba_x0165_o, Johanna Bockman, Kathrin B hm, Anetta Mona Chi_x0219_a, Cooking Sections, Annalee Davis, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Ferenc Gr f, Dusan Jani_x010D_ek, Edit Molnar, Ilona Nemeth, Michael Niblett, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, Joanna Soko_x0142_owska, Imre Szeman, Raluca Voinea copublished with Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL. Ilona Nemeth is an artist, professor, organizer and curator based in Slovakia.