In this post I will summarise and reflect on Polly Savage’s 2022 paper ‘The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity.
The paper by Savage (2022) discusses the experiences and resulting influences of Mozambican art and design students who studied across the Soviet Union during the Cold War era. One key point for me is how deeply aligned the aesthetic expression of the exchange student became to the USSR host countries dominant socialist ideals and visual/graphic canon. I find it interesting that the students were offered an ‘opportunity’ to learn how to become designers/artists who would learn how to express their own messages, but in reality, they learnt mostly technical skills and the visual language of Soviet or socialist decent. Further to this, they were also taught to subtly shape their visual or graphic messages to reflect the dominant Soviet narrative in varying but limited ways, rather than from specific opinions of their own, although later in the paper there are some suggestions that there was some freedom allowed, albeit nuanced.
The decision by the USSR to train students from formally Western and European colonised countries is on one hand anti-colonial, anti-Western, and encouraging revolution from the European colonial rule through cultural means — which is inherently a good thing. However, the Soviet (or other communist/socialist powers of the later 20th century) were actually following a pattern of imperialism or as Savage (2022) puts it using its own ‘brand of imperialism’ (ibid., 2022) which insisted on only using a set of very particular methods of creative expression. Adhering to the socialist aesthetics is, or was, an important part of cultural influence, or we would now call it soft-power, which came from the cultural development programme.
Savage (2022) does however offer a nuanced and quite delicate unpacking of some of the finer elements present in the graphic posters of the most featured artist, known as Cejuma, she positions the artworks as small acts of resistance and artistic personality which supports the pro-Mozambique narrative in a post-colonial and post-revolution country.
In reflection and bringing it to the here and now — I wonder if this is perhaps a good point to be more aware of the soft-power of influence that international students are showered with when arriving at UAL to study? (Another point, which might be answered fiscally alone: why does UAL recruit so many international students?) Through personal and non-documented observation, it appears lecturers/teachers/tutors use predominantly Western-centric references. Do we expect non-Western international students to be somewhat aware of the references that Westerners take for granted? When they possibly have a different cultural or artistic frame of reference? Furthermore, by using these references, and speaking about them in English, do we as lecturers unintentionally softly assert a projected position of superior cultural capital? Whereas it might be simply a matter of (mis) communication?
References
Savage, P. (2022) “‘The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity,” Art history, 45(5), pp. 1078–1100. doi: 10.1111/1467-8365.12692.