Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

From Oil to Electricity: Cultural Form and the Politics of Energy in Latin America brings into focus how energy regimes, including petroleum, electrification, and emergent renewable infrastructures, have shaped cultural production and environmental imagination across the region and its diasporas. Anchored in the work of Santiago Acosta and Victoria Saramago, the seminar examines how twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic and literary practices both register and intervene in the transformations wrought by extractive economies and developmentalist projects. From the cultural formations of Venezuela’s oil boom to the uneven histories of electrification and the contested promises of renewable energy in Brazil, the program traces how aesthetic form is imbricated in the material and political conditions of energy production. Attending to the entanglement of state power, ecological change, and cultural expression, the seminar foregrounds art and literature as critical sites through which the logics of extraction, the infrastructures of electricity, and the contradictions of contemporary energy transitions are made visible, negotiated, and reimagined.
Designed for artists, scholars, arts professionals and advanced students, the program provides a rigorous platform for engaging the intersection within contemporary art discourse, petro-culture and energy studies, and how they open new pathways for thinking through global ecologies and their discontents.