TEXT:

“What remains after this process of retrospective reassessment and prospective revision may indeed ... bear no resemblance to the manifest self-portrait of the human in which our experience of what it means to be human is anchored.”
-Reza Negarestani in Intelligence and Spirit, 2018

Deepwater Horizon is an exhibition of sculpture, video, and appropriated objects by Xavier Mary. The exhibition borrows its name from an ultra-deepwater offshore oil rig that, while one of the deepest rigs ever drilled, culminated in the most catastrophic explosion and oil spill in U.S. history. Sculptures arduously drag from dilapidated industrial material—truck beds, insulation, soot, wheels, and tires—a retrospective capture of automotive dysfunction and material memory. These objects become small structures to consider the near future of the fossil fuel industry and the societal upheaval underway. Flames in Kuwait engulf the reflective surface of a simulated, inverted Toyota emblem in projection. A geologist expounds upon complicity, speculation, risk, and indifference in a video from the back of a pickup truck. Memorabilia exemplifies the hysterical collapse of subject and object in automotive entertainment lore.

How can one examine an artifact of a situation in which they are currently embedded? How can one study an action or movement as it is performed and track its interaction with its environment? How does one comprehend something in which its scale is humanly unimaginable? This exhibition entangles interrelationships conditioned by and constructed from fossil fuel writ large: its interaction with the automotive industry, geological and ecological epochs, and the formation of mythical events and personas.

Deepwater Horizon is a suspended explosion and a quiet collision of geological time, anthropocentric ecological questioning, and quasi-transcendental images of the oil and gas industry. At its core, Deepwater Horizon reformats how we analyze specific aspects of current and future realities; the exhibition challenges the very activity of thinking about the Petrol Age to extrapolate multiple understandings and positions. Instead of prioritizing one extremism over another, the exhibition examines the system itself—the images, conditions, and materials in which extreme situations come to be.

PROGRAM:

Against Fossil Capitalism, Beyond Fossil Futures
A lecture and public discussion with sociologist Jesse Goldstein in conjunction with in the exhibition Deepwater Horizon
Thursday, October 17th, at 6 pm

TOPICS OF DISCUSSION:

1: Climate Emergency? Trust me the big bang was worse (plausible deniability, culpability and the anthropocene)

2: Settler Futurity*: Don’t worry, I have another planet on Netflix (green Keynesianism and the perpetual present)

3: Petro-Masculinity*: From the Flintstones to the Jetsons and back (energy, automation and automobility)

4: Eco-Apartheid*: I said our children were the future, not yours (population control, racial capitalism and right wing environmentalism)

5: Energy Abolition: A billion worlds better than this (abundance, the good life and sociotechnics otherwise)

*All concepts are borrowed, that’s how they circulate. These particular terms come most directly from Andreas Malm, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Cara Daggett, and Van Jones.

Jesse Goldstein is an assistant professor of sociology at VCU. His book, Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism (MITP 2018) examines the limits of confronting climate change through the development and deployment of commercially viable technological fixes.