[spectre] CFP: AlterPlastics: Histories, Aesthetics, Ontologies [synthetic polymers / alternative modernities]

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Andrija Filipovic
Date: Nov 9, 2025
Subject: CFP: AlterPlastics: Histories, Aesthetics, Ontologies

Deadline: Feb 1, 2026

“I, I wear a plastic suit / Plastic is my food / Perhaps, I’m plastic 
too,” sang the iconic Yugoslav New Wave band Idoli in their 1981 song 
“Plastika” (“Plastics”). These lyrics captured a 1980s moment in which 
Yugoslav production, import, and consumption of plastics reached their 
peak. Yet the groundwork for it had been laid in the preceding decades, 
since plastics production had begun shortly after the Second World War 
and rapidly permeated all aspects of everyday life (see Filipović 2023). 
Importantly, Yugoslavia’s trajectory differed from that of the Eastern 
Bloc. Having broken with the USSR in 1948, adopted a system of 
self-managing socialism by 1952, and become a founding member of the 
Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, Yugoslavia occupied a unique geopolitical 
position. This enabled it both to import technologies for plastic 
production and to export plastic products to the Western Bloc. Such 
dynamics also extended into the artistic sphere, shaping the use of 
plastics in both applied and fine arts.

By contrast, the countries of the Eastern Bloc, though diverse and 
shaped by distinct socio-cultural factors, shared the general 
characteristics of Soviet-style planned economies. In these contexts, 
plastics operated at the intersection of several socio-economic 
imperatives. In the German Democratic Republic, for example, plastics 
brought together “the needs of the political economy, the aesthetic 
ideology of modernist industrial designers, and the desires of the 
population for a modern yet efficient life” (Rubin 2008: 2).

While studies of plastics in the West are still rare and tend to focus 
largely on contemporary arts – see Gabrys, Hawkins and Michael (2013), 
Boetzkes (2019), Lambert (2020), Irr (2021), Davis (2022), and Konrad 
(2023) – they are even scarcer when it comes to the (former) Eastern 
Bloc, the Non-Aligned countries, or the contemporary Global South. With 
the title AlterPlastics, we seek to capture the entanglement of 
synthetic polymers with multiple non-capitalist and non-Western 
alternative modernities that emerged in the wake of the Second World 
War, modernities shaped by postcolonial and socialist cultural and 
socio-economic transformations. These processes have given rise to a 
multiplicity of postsocialist and postcolonial planetary 
contemporaneities across what is today called the Global South and the 
former East, all finding their common denominator in what is by now 
commonly described as the Plasticene epoch: an era defined by the 
intensifying extraction of fossil fuels and the overconsumption of 
synthetic polymers.

This volume seeks to address the overlooked histories, aesthetics, and 
ontologies of plastics, with a particular focus on the countries of the 
Eastern Bloc and those belonging to the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as 
the contemporary Global South. We aim to explore how various plastics 
were understood and used across Eastern and Central Europe, Africa, 
Asia, and Latin America during the Cold War, postcolonial and 
postsocialist periods, and to examine their long-term cultural and 
environmental implications. With multiple postcolonial and postsocialist 
temporalities – and plastics themselves – becoming planetary, we also 
invite contributors to trace the entanglements of the postsocialist East 
and postcolonial Global South with the capitalist West and Global North, 
as refracted through plastics.

Material Histories of Synthetic Polymers after the Second World War

We invite chapters that examine the sources of plastics and the 
technologies used in their production. How did plastics participate in 
the establishment of oil cultures and the construction of petromodernity 
in the Eastern Bloc and the Non-Aligned countries? How did the 
technologies and everyday uses of plastics circulate across borders – 
within the Eastern Bloc, among the Non-Aligned countries, and between 
those and the West? Were there reciprocal influences, with ideas or 
practices moving from East to West? How did state institutions and party 
bodies respond to extractive technologies and plastics in general? How 
was plastic waste conceptualized and managed?

Plastics in Art, Design, and Architecture in the Eastern Bloc, 
Non-Aligned Countries and the Global South during and after the Cold War

We are interested in how plastics were used in fine and applied arts 
across different manifestations of socialism in the Eastern Bloc and 
among the Non-Aligned countries. How were plastics conceptualized in 
aesthetics, design, and architectural theory? How did artists and 
designers engage plastics as a material in their work? How did the 
Western Bloc’s use of plastics shape practices in the Eastern Bloc and 
Non-Aligned countries – and vice versa? We are also interested in the 
consequences of situating art, design, and architecture within the 
context of socialist and postcolonial petrocultures. What happens to 
these practices when we follow the material trajectory of plastic – from 
its source in crude oil to its final destination in landfills?

Ontologies of Planetary Synthetics in the Plasticene

Plastics are ubiquitous today, yet don’t seem to have given rise to 
corresponding reconceptualizations of spatial and temporal realms. We 
invite chapters that consider the ontologies of plastics in a moment 
when synthetics have become truly planetary. What kinds of 
spatiotemporalities emerge with the Plasticene calling into question 
earlier categories of thinking? Can we envision a postsocialist theory 
of plastics? What might ontologies of plastics look like from the Global 
South? What would decolonial or Indigenous ontologies of plastics 
entail? Moreover, how do the socio-economic systems producing and 
consuming plastics in the West and Global North appear when viewed from 
the former East or the contemporary Global South? And can a different 
ontopolitics of synthetics emerge from such perspectives?

Please send proposed chapter abstracts (300-500 words) together with 
short biographical notes (150-200 words) to andrija.filipovic at fmk.edu.rs 
and m.jobst at leedsbeckett.ac.uk by 1st February 2025. All authors will 
receive responses by 15th February, after which further details will be 
circulated to chapter authors whose proposals have been accepted. The 
book proposal will be placed with a highly established academic publisher.

Andrija Filipović is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Art & Media 
Theory at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade, Serbia. 
They are the author of (in Serbian) Ars ahumana: Anthropocene 
ontographies in 21st century art and culture (2022), Conditio ahumana: 
Immanence and the ahuman in the Anthropocene (2019). Their articles 
appeared in Sexualities, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal 
of Homosexuality, Contemporary Social Science, and a number of edited 
volumes such as Plastics, Environment, Culture and the Politics of Waste 
(Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Sound Affects: A User’s Guide 
(Bloomsbury, 2023), and The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect 
(Routledge, 2022). Their research interests include environmental 
humanities, queer studies and philosophy.

Marko Jobst is Senior Lecturer at Leeds School of Architecture. He holds 
a Diploma in Architecture from Belgrade University and MArch, MSc and 
PhD in architectural history and theory from The Bartlett School of 
Architecture, UCL. He is the author of A Ficto-Historical Theory of the 
London Underground (2017) and co-editor of Architectural Affects After 
Deleuze and Guattari with Prof Hélène Frichot (2021), Queering 
Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies with Prof Naomi 
Stead (2023), and Instituting Worlds: Architecture and Islands with Prof 
Catharina Gabrielsson (2024). His research interests include the 
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, affect and queer theories, and 
performative modes of writing.

References

Boetzkes, Amanda. 2019. Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the 
Drive to Waste. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Davis, Heather. 2022. Plastic Matter. Durham: Duke University Press.

Filipović, Andrija. 2023. “Jugoplastika: Plastics and Postsocialist 
Realism.” In Plastics, Environment, Culture and the Politics of Waste, 
edited by Tatiana Konrad, 125-142. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Gabrys, Jennifer, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael. eds. 2013. Accumulation: 
The Material Politics of Plastic. London and New York: Routledge.

Irr, Caren. ed. 2021. Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to 
Petromodernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Konrad, Tatiana. ed. 2023. Plastics, Environment, Culture and the 
Politics of Waste. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Lambert, Susan. ed. 2020. Provocative Plastics: Their Value in Design 
and Material Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rubin, Eli. 2008. Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the 
German Democratic Republic. Chapel Hill: The University of North 
Carolina Press.


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CFP: AlterPlastics: Histories, Aesthetics, Ontologies. In: ArtHist.net, 
Nov 9, 2025. <https://arthist.net/archive/51100>.