Online (Zoom) & Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI), Gartensaal, Goethestr. 31, 45128 Essen
For further information, for the zoom-link (if you can’t make it to Essen) visit the KWI-website
Press the ignition. Hear the combustion engine. Smell the Gasoline fumes. Feel the improbably smooth and bright coloured plastic surfaces of a vehicle’s interior. Ride. Dream. What do you see?
Petroleum has enabled and shaped modern experience. Beauty and horror lie closely together in the petrol age. With their research collective ‚Beauty of Oil‘, Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger trace the deeply ambivalent character of fossil energy and matter through layers of knowledge, politics, arts, ecologies, and everyday lives. Their ‚Atlas of Petromodernity‚ (Santa Barbara 2024, Berlin 2020) maps a panorama of technologies, geographies, histories, and experiences with what is both a chemical energy resource and a cultural drug connected to almost all our epoch’s forms of pleasure and guilt.