Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

Santiago Acosta
“We Are Like Oil: Culture, Nature, and Modernity in Venezuela.”

While the 1970s are remembered as a decade of energy crisis, in Venezuela they were a period of extraordinary abundance that redefined the nation’s economy, culture, and relation to the environment. Oil wealth drove rapid modernization and an unprecedented expansion of state-funded cultural production. Paradoxically, it also paved the way for the crises of the 1980s. This talk examines how culture became a crucial site for articulating the meanings, contradictions, and lasting effects of oil modernity, tracing how art, literature, and visual media responded to, and often helped organize, the era’s vast social and ecological transformations. First, I examine neo-avant-garde artistic practices that advanced early critiques of extraction and the commodification of nature in the 1960s. Second, I analyze kinetic art produced for energy infrastructure projects in the 1970s and 1980s, where abstraction intersected with state-led extraction and environmental transformation. Rather than tracking direct representations of petroleum in art or literature, the talk traces the indirect ways oil fueled the relations between culture, nature, and state power during the 1970s oil boom and its aftermath.

Victoria Saramango
“Against the Current: Electricity and the Environmental Imagination in Brazil.”

This talk discusses how electricity is deeply intertwined with cultural production and formative of the narratives that have come to define the Anthropocene in the Great Acceleration in Brazil. In doing so, I call for a reassessment of the commonly positive association between the spectacles of light and dreams of increased productivity inherent to imaginations of the electrical in modernity and beyond. Drawing a counterpoint to this paradigm, this talk underscores how the other side of our twentieth- and twenty-first-century “electrocultures” is the appropriation of labor and natural resources, as well as the structural modes of exclusion, that the generation of energy requires. This includes the environmental impact of our electrically fueled present, such as the already scholarly-encoded impact of fossil fuels in the petrocultures in which we live, as well as the many cultural traditions of thinking outside of and in contrast to this paradigm. To propose such reading, I examine two examples. The first one makes the case for a reassessment of the cultural production on the sertão (usually translated as backlands) through the lenses of the highly uneven process of electrification in rural and semirural areas, whose significant gaps in supply persisted into the early twenty-first century. Through a reading of João Guimarães Rosa’s novella Buriti (1956), I argue that the sertão, whose representations systematically worked as an opposite, as a negative of the wide and heterogenous waves of modernization usually associated with urban areas, has been culturally understood in contrast to the experience, implications and consequences of electrification in Brazil. The second example focuses on the predominance of hydropower in Brazil’s electrical matrix. Acting against the plausible public appreciation of dams as peaceful lakes or feats of engineering, I show how the tapestries known as arpilleras produced by women from the Movement of Victims of Dams narrativize the experience of change as a way of drawing attention to the violence of building megadams as they spread across the country, and especially in the Amazonian region.