With our double panel »The Chemistry of Energy« and the excursion and speculative workshop »Betterfield« to Chemiepark Bitterfeld-Wolfen (curated and performed by NORMALS, Berlin) »Beauty of Oil« was very present at the first Petrocultures conference in Germany (see the program and all abstracts here).
We did understand the conference title and imperative »Situating Energy« both in a technological and in a geographic-historical sense. In fact this double spotlight on downstream/chemistry and on the cultural experiences with multiple petromodernities in Central Europe did enrich the even at Dresden still quite Northern American and quite extraction focused petrocultures debate.
We very much thank all the organisers from TU-Dresden and all our panelists – Lucie Česálková, Věra Dvořáčková, Guillermo Restrepo, Veit Braun, Sarandha Jain, Alexander Wagner, Daniel Wolter, Hannah Müller, Julia-Lena Reinermann, Léo Schillmöller – and all workshop-contributers for their great work!
Two panels co-chaired by Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger within Petrocultures 2026 Dresden: »Situating Energy«, August 26-28, 2026
Please share and send proposals until January 18 2026!
llustrations taken from: Alexander E. Fersman, Geochemistry for Everyone, Moskow 1958.
The plethora of new materials in the petromodern era—refined fuels, ammunition, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, plastics—were fashioned as complex chemical-industrial products. Current proposals for an ecological and just transition moving away from fossil resources and other destructive forms of extractivism largely rest on the ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ transformation of exactly these petromodern developments in chemical sciences and technology. However, despite its pivotal historical role in shaping the petromodern present, chemical technology has received little attention in petromodernity research.
With our panels we propose to read the programmatic Dresden call for “Situating energies” as a motivation to focus on the chemical sciences, technologies and infrastructures that provide energy and materials for all types of societal metabolisms— and on their social and cultural repercussions. In doing so, we investigate both the epistemologies behind chemical principles and technologies, as well as their geographical and historical situatedness—in our case in Central Europe, in Germany, in the former GDR, at the crossroads of historical experiences with different types of petromodernity: capitalist, NS, social-democratic, socialist, and post-Soviet.
The aim of our panel is to identify and analyze chemical-societal “double bonds” that combine perspectives on chemical technologies with perspectives on social, societal and political experiences. We therefore invite proposals to address chemical geographies and constellations from industry and scientific research to social and cultural aspects; from chemical factories and laboratories to bodies and landscapes. We encourage contributions from all fields of social and cultural research, as well as from chemistry, the humanities, history, and artistic or curatorial research. Although our focus is on Central Europe, we welcome contributions that deal with chemical geographies around the globe.
With speeches by Juri Rappsilber, Maria Andrea Mroginski, Matthias Driess, Peter Seeberger, and Benjamin Steininger, Cluster of Excellence UniSysCat celebrated its 18th anniversary at TU-Berlin.
Time, to recall the past of quite an era of outstanding catalysis research in Berlin since 2007 with UniCat and UniSysCat, and to also envision the future of a further transformation of chemistry and the respective role of research on industrial, chemical, and biochemical catalysis processes.
And high time for me, to warmly thank all UniSysCat-colleagues for their cooperation and generous support in the last seven years!
Alexander Klose at Roundtable in University Paris 1, Sorbonne on »Exhibition making in the age of fossil fuels – beyond the petrochemical«, Dec. 5 2025
How is the imperative of energy transition changing the art world? How are artists, curators, critics, conservators and restorers working towards a world without oil? To answer these questions, we intend to bring together artists, activists, curators, researchers and other art world actors in four cities in Atlantic countries with strong links to the history of oil: Lagos, Mexico City, New York and Paris. Over the course of four half-days, we propose to discuss across fields of activities and continents recent developments in contemporary art practices linked to ecological objectives, as well as the transformation of imaginary images of oil in the visual arts.
1st in a series of four international workshops, 5 december 2025, 14h Salle Vasari, INHA
17h-18h / Roundtable 3 : Exhibition making in the age of fossil fuels – beyond the petrochemical/ Curater dans l’ère fossile – vers d’autres modèles
Chair : Lotte Arndt Speakers : Anna Colin, Camille Richert (researchers and curators), Keren Detton (FRAC Grand Large Hauts-de-France director), Chaleur humaine, Triennale Art et Industrie de Dunkerque (2023) & Alexander Klose (researcher and curator) Research Collective Beauty of Oil
Find more information on the event in Paris as well as on the workshop series here.
Ausgangspunkt ist unser ‘Atlas der Aetromoderne’. Wir erklären Form, Intention und Gewinn einer Herangehensweise, die es erlaubt, zwischen zeitlichen Skalen und räumlichen Maßstabsverhältnissen zu springen und Verbindungen herzustellen zwischen scheinbar heterogenen oder weit auseinanderliegenden Wissens- und Erfahrungsfeldern: vom molekularen zum planetarischen, vom kleinen technischen Detail zur globalen Infrastruktur, vom Knacken einer Schallplatte zum Donnner von Kanonen, von einer getuschten Wimper zu einem Meeresstrand aus Plastikgranulat, vom Körperinneren zum Erdäußeren.
Präsentationsfolie. Diese und alle anderen Collagen auf dieser Seite: Beauty of Oil 2025
Die exzeptionelle Dynamik der Epoche der Moderne − was wir wissen, wie wir leben, was wir erwarten − hängt auf vielfältige Weise an der Nutzung fossiler Naturgeschichte in Form von Kohle, Öl und Gas.
Die Moderne ist eine ‘Petromoderne‘ in nahezu all ihren Errungenschaften, Abgründen und Widersprüchen. Um die Position des Menschen in dieser Epoche zu deuten, um zu ermitteln, was wir hinter uns lassen sollten, aber auch, worum es zu kämpfen gilt, müssen alle Skalen zwischen molekularen, technischen, historischen, kulturellen und planetarischen Prozessen zusammengedacht werden.
Nur wenn wir ‘fossile Vernunft’ als solche verstanden haben, können wir unsere Gesellschaften postfossil weiterentwickeln. Denn der notwendige Abschied von fossilen Energieträgern betrifft weit mehr als nur Mobilität und Heizung.
Die conditio humana, so unsere These, in die die Menschen der industriellen Zivilisation eingetreten sind, und aus der heraus sie die gewaltige Aufgabe haben, Verantwortung für den gesamten Planeten zu übernehmen und ihr zukünftiges Handeln danach auszurichten, ist eine petromoderne conditio. angemessene Anthropologien dafür sind aber erst im entstehen (etwa im Begriff der ‘Geoanthropologie’).
Mehr noch als der nicht zuletzt geschichtsphilosophische Begriff des Anthropozän erlaubt es der Blick über den Begriff der Petromoderne, die materiellen Voraussetzungen der Technologien und Handlungsweisen, Denkmuster und Ansprüche, die unsere gegenwärtige Lage definieren, zu erkennen und zu benennen. er setzt keinen einheitlichen ‘Anthropos’ voraus, sondern folgt den sehr unterschiedlichen, petromodernen Techniken, Geografien, Politiken rund um den Globus und durch die Geschichte, um herauszufinden, welche Mensch-Erde-Interaktionen dort jeweils wirksam sind.
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.
These events show how important it is for petromodernity research from the cultural sciences to get in touch and to keep contact to the practitioners of chemistry innovation.
It is important for both sides, since it is us to deliver topics and keywords that chemists interact with their work without noticing, and that otherwise might have not be mentioned at such conferences such as »Anthropocene«, »petromodernity«, »chemical geography«, »chemical cultural theory«, »Chemiewende«, »Geoanthropology«…
To adjust a famous quote: Chemists are the ones that are changing the world in different ways, but it will still take something like philosophers to interpret.
What by twitter news beeping phones during our workshop turned out as a dramatic day of political threats against Columbia University, started calmly with a familiar book cover in the opening remarks by Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Avinoam Shalem…
