English translation of our Atlas by Ayça Türkoğlu, updated and enlarged edition with a new introduction by Stephanie LeMenager and a new concluding chapter, »Zombie«, on the still not closed case of petromodern destruction. In print and open access!
“The Atlas of Petromodernity offers us the chance to be a flaneur within its distinctively curated and therefore somewhat realistic world. Enter at your own risk, with the affinity for risk that may well define you, even still.” Stephanie LeMenager
For more details on publication, dates, and availability see here: punctumbooks.com
Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck – Last oil barrel, date postponed
Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck – Last oil barrel – detail
Diann Bauer – Prologue: Politics as Palliative Care of the Species, 2019 – Video 11:20 min. + XFAST, 2019 – Introductory video for ‘If Nature is Unjust, Change Nature’ talk, 5:20 min
Jan Eric Visser – Untitled, 2023, #1+2
Jan Eric Visser – Untitled, 2023, #3
Jan Eric Visser – Untitled, 2023, #4
Yuri Ancarani – The Challenge, 2016 – Video 70 min
All photos by Aad Hoogendorn, if not mentioned otherwise
All the artworks in the show – Chapter 4: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (8 slides)
Andrew Castrucci – Fracktured lives, 2021
Andrew Castrucci – Fracktured lives, 2021 – artist book
Booktable (photo by Alessia Taló)
Chto Delat collective – School of Emergencies, 2023: Lecture performance by Oxana Timofeeva – Video 44 min + Between Shadow and Light, 2023 – Video 70 min + Inside the Diagram – Video 11 min
Chto Delat collective – School of Emergencies, 2023 – detail
Chto Delat collective – School of Emergencies, 2023 – detail
Kevin van Braak & Ipeh Nur – Silence would be treason, 2023
Kevin van Braak & Ipeh Nur – Silence would be treason, 2023 – detail
All photos by Aad Hoogendorn, if not mentioned otherwise.
Exhibition spaces and scenography (slide show).
Atelier van Lieshout Sculpture Garden Entrance. Photo: Alex Close
Rowan van As’ Taxi on the sidewalk in front of Brutus. Photo: Alex Close
Brutus street entrance, Keileweg 18. Photo: Alex Close
Entrance to Petromelancholia through AVL sculpture garden. Photo: Alex Close
Opening speeches in AVL sculpture garden. Photo: Caro Linares
Entrance Petromelancholia on opening night. Photo Caro Linares
Exhibition space “Kathedraal” during build-up. Photo: Alex Close
Installing Marina Zurkow’s Petroleum Manga in “Kathedraal”. Photo: Alex Close
Exhibition at Brutus, in the port of Rotterdam, NL, Sept 1 to Nov 19
In bed with petroleum. In the air. On the road. On the plate. All over and inside bodies. It’s a love affair that modern industrial civilization has been having with oil (and gas), its fuels and the materials created from it. More than that: it’s a love of life, profoundly influencing how people live, move, eat, dress, love, experience, aspire, and believe. A love, though, that has increasingly expressed destructive aspects, excess, exhaustion, abuse, addiction, and contamination.
“Petromelancholia” is the condition that the US energy humanities scholar Stephanie LeMenager diagnosed as being at the core of her home country’s cultural and political struggle to hang on to “oil culture“. The more people realize that the age of oil is eventually going to end—and has to in regard to the state of the planet—the harder they cling on to it. Following this diagnosis, the world has lately been swept by waves of petromelancholia. Acknowledging the long-lasting success of these dynamics of denial, which started 50 years ago, a mere “energy transition” might turn out to be not enough to get over modernity’s true love.
Wouldn’t we also need acceptance and grief, reconciliation and reparations—processes that eventually lead to profound cultural, political and economic transitions?
Upon opening of our OIL-exhibition in Wolfsburg two years ago, Joep van Lieshout, one of the participating artists, asked if we wanted to curate a follow-up show at his newly founded „artist-driven space“ Brutus in the port of Rotterdam.
Rotterdam! One of the oil capitals of Europe, largest port, largest refinery, largest petroleum storage and processing capacities. Largely and radically rebuilt after WW2 in all kinds of modernist style — a through and through petromodern city.
And since our 2017 visit to a Delft ‘Petroleumscapes’ conference, the region had played a role in our own petroleumscapes research, resulting in ‘Greenhause’, a chapter of our Atlas and in some smaller essays and publications).
Though a comparably low-budget project, the possibility to bring our curatorial research there was tempting.
After one and a half years of preparation, with a short residency and a petrosalon at Goethe Institut Rotterdam in april last year as startig points and deciding additional help and motivation, the exhibition opened on Friday, Sept 1st! Other than our Wolfsburg exhibition, which claimed to show the first retrospective of 100 years of petromodern art, „Petromelancholia“ is largely dedicated to our contemporary petromodern states of heart and mind.
The exhibition consists of four chapters: 1 In Bed with Oil 2 Oil Encounters 3 Toxic Legacy and the Museum of Petromodern Futures 4 Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.
The opening paragraphs of this entry are from the wall-text of the first chapter. All four wall-texts can be downloaded as a pdf here.
Click here to see a photo documentation of all the works in the exhibition.
The exhibition is spread over the complete Brutus-compound and consists of four chapters. Here’s a floorplan (click on image to enlarge or download as pdf).
The very well written book takes on the form of the ironic encyclopedia that has been popular since the nineteenth century, as a parody of the great encyclopedias of the Enlightenment era. Impressive color illustrations complement the text and, according to the authors, justify the “Atlas” of the subtitle (p. 15). In their individual glosses, the authors almost always succeed in offering interesting and often novel discoveries. For example, the topic of drilling is presented in a well-founded and stimulating manner in a brief account. The catalytically controlled chemical transformation of petroleum constituents is also solidly presented under the heading “Molecular Mobilization” (pp. 49–57). Often, the reader’s expectations are deliberately played with—as, for example, when the essay entitled “Animals in the Oil Field” (pp. 199–203) deals not with seabirds that are glued together and dying but, rather, with animals that visit drilling grounds. This approach arouses interest and curiosity but also increases perplexity. The reader is left alone with the material and must tell his own story.
And this is precisely the goal; it also fits the form of the ironic encyclopedia, which from the outset does not lead one to expect that an overview will be presented. The history of oil is a history that crashes over us. “Erdöl: Ein Atlas der Petromoderne” aims to use brief spotlights, from very different perspectives, to draw attention to a substance that is part of the everyday life of modernity. It succeeds in doing so; at the same time, the well documented individual articles offer suggestions for further study and some connections that may be new even to researchers who have been in the field for some time. An English edition is in preparation.«
»Petromelancholia« examines the enormous consequences of a life beyond oil, the magnitude of which many do not yet realize. Unlike the many exhibitions that sing about doom scenarios or kick in the open doors of the climate crisis, Petromelancholia reflects on the legacy of the oil age and the new meaning that this past will irrevocably acquire. What has oil brought us, materially and especially culturally, and what might disappear or change?
A large croud is present at Alexander Klose’s opening speech at BRUTUS Rotterdam!
It’s hard to think of a better location for Petromelancholia than at BRUTUS – situated in the Rotterdam harbor. In few places will the impact of the energy transition be more visible than here. This is therefore the most appropriate place for critical self-reflection with a good dose of melancholy and nostalgia. The exhibition reflects an urgency that has never before been felt this strong.
With works by: Yuri Ancarani (ITA), Rowan van As (NLD), Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck (VEN/GER), Diann Bauer (USA), Uwe Belz (GER), Vanessa Billy (CHE), Kevin van Braak & Ipeh Nur (NLD/IDN), Imani Jacqueline Brown (USA), Andrew Castrucci (USA), Chto Delat (RUS), Timo Demollin (NLD), Tanja Engelberts (NLD), Christoph Girardet (GER), Rumiko Hagiwara (JPN/NLD), heidundgriess (GER), Bernhard Hopfengärtner (GER), Aaditi Joshi (IND), Olaf Mooij (NLD), Leonhard Müllner & Robin Klengel (AUT), Hugo Niebeling (GER), Alain Resnais (FRA), Konstantin Schimanowski (RUS/GER), Miriam Sentler (NLD), Sanaz Sohrabi (IRN/CAN), Johannes Steendam (NLD), Gunhild Vatn (NOR), Jan Eric Visser (NLD), Rachel Youn (USA), Marina Zurkow (USA).
Visit Petromelancholia from 2nd of Sep until 19th of Nov.
During the official opening on Friday September 1st from 8 pm live performances Kems Kriol and DJ Sjoerd Oberman in collaboration with MOMO Fabrique Festival.
From Oct 25 to 29 several special events related to Petromelancholia at Goethe Institut Rotterdam and at Brutus. Program will be published here.
Exhibition on post-mining landscapes and mentalities, on mining that takes place elsewhere, and on the relation between precious metals and digital culture.
Co-curated by Beauty of Oil’s Alexander Klose together with Daniel Herrmann, artistic director of Werkleitz.
From June 2nd to 18th on the compound of Wiederstedt Castle, where the early romantic poet Novalis spent his childhood, in Mansfeld county, a former mining region 40 km west of Halle (Saale).
Egill Sæbjörnsson, Troll Coins, 2023. Installation video @Alexclose
Nature does not want to be the exclusive possession of a single individual. (Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen)
What is My Precious today? And what does that still have to do with exquisite materials from underground? An exhibition project about local and global mining, its consequences as well as its people and natural conditions.
Mansfeld region 2023. The mining district in the triangle between Eisleben, Sandersleben was up until recently a place of hard work down in the mines and in the foundries. Now the region is seeking new added values and virtues. It is said that mining shapes people in a special way. Today, 30 years after the abrupt end, what about the afterlife and survival of the old values? What new values have been created?
Werkleitz has invited ten internationally working artists for the 2023 My Precious festival. With eight new works created specifically for the festival and two works adapted to the local conditions, they respond to the complex mélange of questions that arise when looking at the Mansfeld region today. A film room curated by Florian Wüst in the Inspektorhaus, as well as a dense program of artist talks, guided thematic walks, workshops for children, concerts, readings, and much more complete the festival offerings. Lena Reisner, whose exhibition Fossil experience could be seen in Berlin in 2022, was invited as a free curatorial researcher and came back with stories about women in the mines from Saint Barbara to actual workers.
The participating artists were, in alphabetical order: Ana Alenso, Mabe Bethônico, Karsten Bott, Viktor Brim, Felicitas Fäßler, Juliane Henrich, Stephanie Kiwitt, Barbara Marcel, Agnieszka Polska, and Egill Sæbjörnsson.
Mabe Bethonico, The Collective Dig. A Papertheatre on the Myths of Extraction, 2023Barbara Marcel, Golden Tone, 2018-21Felicitas Fässler, Outcrop, 2023Karsten Bott, One Of Each – Kahlenberg/Bott, 2023Agnieska Polska, The Demon’s Brain, 2018
Ana Alenso, Glück auf!, 2023Juliane Henrich, Dendrites, 2023Stephanie Kiwitt, S. Anders leben, 2023“Mein Schatz Kiste”/mediation station about women in the mines, realized in cooperation with Lena ReisnerVictor Brim, the cavity inside, 2023
These and all other illustrations in this post: graphic recordings by Sheree Domingo
Commissioned and hosted by foresight departments at Evonik and Deutsche Bahn and co-curated by Beauty of Oil-member and speculative designer Bernd Hopfengärtner, the conference took place in a beautiful building in Potsdam, the former “Kaiserbahnhof” at the south end of the palace gardens of Sans Soucis. Beauty of Oil-member and cultural researcher Alexander Klose was invited to give a talk on petromodernity and BoO’s activities as opener of the conference’s second session “Tipping Scales – tracing links from particle to planet”.
Here’s what Bernd Hopfengärtner wrote as introduction to this session: “Sometimes, the biggest changes take place in the smallest details. In the 19th century, organic chemistry discovered fossil hydrocarbons, the basic building blocks of petromodernity. The consequences of this discovery – the unleashed availability of energy and the ability to shape material into basically any form – still make up our reality: leisure, freedom, division of labour, nutrition, knowledge society and Tupperware parties on the one hand; geopolitical conflicts, exploitation of people, natural disasters and climate change on the other. What the historical mobilisation of hydrocarbons was to energy and materials, the emerging manipulation of quantum states might be to information, or the designability of genetic functions to life. A petro-modern perspective on the history and present shows us how important it is to look for connecting lines between the very small and the very large. What does this perspective tell us about current future technologies? How can we imagine the implications of bio and quantum technologies? What approaches and tools can we use?” (conference program)
And here’s the abstract of Klose’s talk: “Molecular mobilization and molecular history—the accumulative powers of the very small entities in machines and in societies—go hand in hand and reach planetary dimensions in the petromodern era. Its dynamics are composed by the hard powers of science and technology, industry and economics, as well as the soft powers of habits and pretensions, thoughts and beliefs. It is an era of excess: In order to understand what we might have to leave behind, we should not only study energy production and scenarios of scarcity but also consumerism and the promises of abundant lifestyles. If we don’t consider the latter, the molecular dynamics of petromodernity will prevail, even without petroleum.”
Petromodernity and its Tenacities,download presentationhere.
»The satellite image above shows the Port of Rotterdam, the biggest harbor in Europe. At Maasvlakte 2, an artificial island just off the coastline, the world’s largest tankers are able to dock. Around 100 million tons of crude oil reach Rotterdam each year, half of which are processed on-site in five petrochemical refineries, including Europe’s largest, the Shell refinery at Pernis«. (link to the English essay here)(link zum deutschen Text hier)
Alexander Klose at the University of Possibilities in Lützerath
lignite open pit mining in Germany? In 2022? Are you serious?!
View on RWE’s Garzweiler 2 mine in full action. In the background on the right photo lignite-fired power plants and wind farm.
Lützerath is a village in the western Rhineland that had to make place for one of Germany’s most contested fossil fuel projects. Since the 1980’s citizens, politicians and NGOs like BUND have been fighting against the plans of North Rhine-Westfalia’s energy giant RWE to double the size of a hundred year old brown coal mine in order to take out a couple of hundred million tons of brown coal. Dozens of law suits, government changes, parliament hearings, demonstrations, climate agreements, climate catastrophes (the Erft valley area that was so heavily flooded in the summer of 2021 is right around the corner), occupations and evictions later, the situation has still not been settled.
A temporary stop has been put to the enlargement plans, but not all of the territory and the villages on it, destined to be destroyed according to the initial plans of RWE and the then social-democratic government of North Rhine-Westfalia are secured. Despite the political decision to completely end the use of coal as energy source in Germany until 2038, or even 2030. In 2015, Ende Gelände startet its direct actions of civil disobedience against coal extraction and combustion with blockades in the Garzweiler mines. Human ecologist and climate activist Andreas Malm mentions them a couple of times in his book How to blow up a pipeline, a plea for direct militant actions like blockades and sabotage to flank the peaceful mass protests of Fridays for Future and the like in order to enhance their assertiveness.
location of the University of possibilities at the brim of the coal mine as part of the Unräumbar-festival Sept 22
Lützerath has become a hotspot for the struggle when one of its old citizens refused to sell his house and stayed while RWE started to demolish houses and tear out streets and infrastructure around in January 2021, inviting activists to stay with him. In Sept 2022 this last man standing left after having finally lost his law trials against eviction in March. Since then the camp has been officially turned into an illegal squat, and the squatters have proclaimed the ZAD Rheinland in Lützerath, following the example of the militant Zone à défendre (zone to be defended) in France, The Netherlands, and Switzerland.
I had been invited to talk about our work with Beauty of Oil in the framework of a “University of possibilities”, a series of workshops, presentations and experimental discourse formats intended to accompany and maybe even ground activism with philosophical and speculative thought. “Philosophy can also be direct action,” as Lee, one of the initiators who had invited me, told me in the evening when she toured me around camp after my talk.
Here’s the abstract of my talk:
Just What is It That Makes Today’s Lifes So Different, so Appealing? – on the tenacity of petromodern claims and ways.
Presentation and discussion by/with Alexander Klose
(Research collective Beauty of Oil, Berlin/Vienna; Office for precarious concepts and undisciplinary research, Berlin)
Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, so Appealing?, 1956
Living in the plastic world / Living in the plastic world / Plastics, plastics everywhere / Where I walk and stand / PVC, PVC everywhere.
This is how A+P, an early German Punkband, put it in 1980.
Artificial matter, artificial fertilizer / Artificial grass / Artificial life / False teeth, false eyelashes / False love / All false here.
We have been living in petromodernity—the era of petrochemically based fuels and materials saturating all regions of life—for more than 100 years. Plastics is the new prima materia of this age, embodiment and incarnation of a second nature. For more than 50 years, people around the globe, but especially in the north-western heartlands of the petromodern civilization process have gotten increasingly aware that some things are fundamentally wrong with this time and its ruling principles. Starting in the late 1960s, the emissions of factories and cars transmuted from a sign of progress into one of imminent dangers, and plastics from the most modern material and guarantor of luxury for all into a cypher for everything that was a lie in the modern promises.
Yet, the dynamics of petromodern and—in a larger picture—fossil economics, claims, life styles, and belief systems haven’t been decelerated. Quite the opposite: the Great Acceleration has been continuing more or less full force, with the amount of consumer goods, cars, transport, energy use, plastification, extraction, and toxic emissions increasing globally against all objections or better knowledge.
Why is that so? And how can it be overcome?
The research collective Beauty of Oil works on understanding these petromodern dynamics in their tenaciousness. My talk introduces our projects, core theorems and approaches, and discusses possible future perspectives between technological fixes, ecological socio-economic reform and radical revolution.
The talk tracks the relationship between the „digital age“ and petromodernity. As much as data is called the new oil today, oil has been the new data from the 1950s onwards. There may even be a homology of how these technologies tackle with and bring forward new realities, if you compare cracking–as the core petrochemical operation in which the molecules of hydrocarbon substances are torn apart and their atoms are recombined in new molecular compounds–with the way digital computers symbolize and re-organize material realities. Today, the worlds of social media and gaming are mostly keeping the petromodern promises for individual empowerment and entertainment. Fossil capitalism’s logic of extractivism has been extended both to new raw materials that are needed for the lightweight technology and to the consumers whose behavioral traces have become the “new oil”. What are the chances, what are the dangers of a media and energy transition „beyond oil“ that prolongates petromodernity?
(Oil)Platform capitalism and oil rig as wifi hub – two metaphorical takes on how data and oil economies are related
IT and industrial technology have never been separated as the story of a new digital age seems to imply. Quite the opposite, the oil industry has been one of the most important drivers of digital technology development from early on, namely for oil exploration.
The mining and development of “tough oil” reservoirs would not have been possible without computers. As much as data is called the new oil today, oil has been the new data from the 1950s onwards.
Action in the digital sphere happens in „the cloud“ – a metaphor that evokes lightweight molecules and accumulations in thin air. As we all know, the truth looks distinctly different: the global digital technosphere is made of millions of kilometers of cables and megatons of concrete, plastics, steel and silicium.
If the internet were a country, it would range third in electricity consumption after the U.S. and China. (Research Group Digitization and Social-Ecological Transformation, Berlin 2019.)
Even if the new very large data centers run on renewable energy, the carbon footprint of digital technology as a whole has become frighteningly significant.
While the use of these devices differs considerably, the material and technological resources that contribute to their “functionality” have a shared substrate in plastic and copper, solvents and silicon. Electronics typically are composed of more than 1000 different materials, components that form part of a materials program that is far-reaching and spans from microchip to electronic systems. (…) to produce a two-gram memory microchip, 1.3 kilograms of fossil fuels and materials are required.
(Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish. A Natural History of Electronics, Ann Arbor 2011)
Diagrammatic representation of Cracking process from petrochemistry textbook.
Cracking paradigm The operational approach of informatics—to convey and calculate everything through discrete symbols —equals the operational approach of industrial chemistry—to rip complex materials in their smallest parts, molecules and atoms, and to recombine and optimize them.
Elements become isolated, analyzed, synthesized, and enter into circulation as deterritorialized bits of information that can be traded in complex, global ways. From soil to minerals to chemicals, their scientific framing and engineering is also a prelude to their status as commodities. (…) The periodic table is one of the most important reference points in the history of technological capitalism. The insides of computers are folded with their outsides in material ways; the abstract topologies of information are entwined with geophysical realities.
(Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media, Minneapolis 2015)
Digital Culture keeps unfullfilled petromodern promises
Understood in this expanded sense, extraction involves not only the appropriation and expropriation of natural resources but also, and in ever more pronounced ways, processes that cut through patterns of human cooperation and social activity. The prospecting logics (…) in the case of literal extraction take on peculiar characteristics here – since they refer precisely to forms of human cooperation and social activity.
(Sandro Mezzadra/Brett Neilson, »On the multiple frontiers of extraction: excavating contemporary capitalism«, Cultural Studies 2-3, 2017)
