Soft Ecologies: Textile Environments under Socialism

Under state socialism, from the 1960s onward, large-scale textile environments emerged as a vital artistic strategy across Eastern Europe. Artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz in Poland, Jagoda Buić in Croatia, Ana Lupaș, Szenes Zsuzsa, and Christa Jeitner mobilized fiber not only as a sculptural material but also as a site of ecological, social, and political inscription. For instance, Abakanowicz’s use of hemp and horsehair invoked vegetal growth and organic processes, while she and her contemporaries developed expansive textile installations that engaged questions of environment, landscape, and material agency.

This paper considers these works through an ecocritical lens, examining how fiber’s tactility and spatiality enabled artists to address emergent ecological crises under socialism—often obliquely, given the constraints of censorship and the ambivalent role of state commissions. Textile environments, situated at the intersection of monumentality and domestic materiality, destabilized the fine art/craft binary while opening a porous field where environmental concerns could be negotiated in coded, metaphorical, or experiential forms.

By foregrounding cross-border networks and the circulation of fiber practices within the socialist cultural sphere, this paper argues that these textile environments articulated an early form of ecological consciousness that complicates Western genealogies of fiber art. Repositioning these practices within both ecocritical and post-socialist discourse reveals fiber’s potential as a medium of environmental critique and as a means of rethinking artistic agency under conditions of ideological constraint.