This seminar explores the relationship between artistic production and the ecology of extraction in Venezuela during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The seminar proposes that culture and the arts have not only documented the transformations brought about by extractive economies, but have been active agents in producing and contesting them.
We will begin with a broad discussion about Venezuela’s position in the global ecology of extraction, interrogating the historical role of the state as a “magical” mediator between the nation’s subterranean wealth and the project of modernization. We will then turn to questions about the place of culture and aesthetics in the consolidation of extractive regimes, with particular attention to geometric abstraction and kinetic art in mid-twentieth-century state-led development. Finally, we will examine the present moment through the work of contemporary artists engaging with gold extraction in the Amazon, analyzing evolving extractive practices and the uncertain futures they suggest.
-
Seminar 1
Mon, Aug 17, 20261:30 pm to 3:30 pm -
Seminar 2
Tue, Aug 18, 20261:30 pm to 3:30 pm -
Seminar 3
Wed, Aug 19, 20261:30 pm to 3:30 pm -
Lecture: We Are Like Oil: Culture, Nature, and Modernity in Venezuela
Thu, Aug 20, 20265:00 pm to 7:30 pm
Santiago Acosta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He works on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts, with a focus on cultural responses to extractivism, petroleum economies, and environmental crisis. His research combines approaches from cultural studies, political economy, and environmental theory. His book manuscript, We Are Like Oil: Culture, Nature, and Modernity in Venezuela, explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental transformations of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. He is also co-editor of the volume Ecopoéticas y políticas ecológicas desde Abya Yala (Forthcoming from Brill, 2026). From 2021 to 2023, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY Old Westbury, where he helped launch of the college’s Environmental Studies program. At Yale, Acosta is a member of the Environmental Humanities Steering Committee and serves on the faculty board at The Creative Forum. Acosta is also an award-winning poet. His collection The Coming Desert won the José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “City and Nature,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair and Guadalajara’s Museum of Environmental Sciences. He has received support from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and was an invited poet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26. While in Caracas, he co-founded the poetry journal El Salmón, which won a National Book Award. His selected poems appeared in 2024 with Visor Libros under the title La desesperanza (Hopelessness).