The naming of our world’s eras tends to focus on specific crude substances. These are usually the specific matters which played a major role in world’s evolution and revolutions of technologies. It is needless to say how important these substances are, as they clearly shaped the specific courses that our civilization took. From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age and to the age of Gunpowder and the atomic bomb, these specific terming illustrate how extracted substances and those produce on the surface of the globe defined the specific routes of technological revolutions and were used and misused by imperial powers to maintain martial hegemony and sustain economic supremacy. The “Age of Petroleum” is another stirring chapter in the long and entangled history of materials and imperial powers.
How have extractions and circulations of petroleum shaped culture and art? How have they been entangled with modernism and even nation-identity-making, especially as they went through aestheticization and poetization processes in the arts and especially in the visual media? The aestheticization approach towards petroleum lends itself particularly well to our possible full understanding of the age of petroleum.
This exploratory workshop takes its first cue from an interest in Baku, the earliest modern site for the industrial extraction of petroleum, and in the Mediterranean as a site of global connectivity, yet conflicted economic inequality, and as the primary corridor for the extraction and circulation of black oil. It brings together several scholars and artists who, by looking at a range of exemplary media, sites, and practices around the world, might suggest reading the period commonly labelled as modernity through the lens of petroculture. The question of the aestheticization of petroleum appears as a timely query, which slices through layers of trans-national and transcultural histories at the intersection of the environmental, social and economic layers of historiography.
Due to current campus access restrictions to non-Columbia affiliates, we kindly ask you to register at this form no later than March 2nd at 11:59 pm if you plan on attending this workshop.
