170 - Ursula Biemann

Cultures of Energy

Dominic and Cymene talk about the weltschmerz of turning 10, review this week’s flood & fire news and offer handy recycling tips (e.g. don't recycle snakes!) on this week’s podcast. We then (19:08) are delighted to welcome the marvelous video artist, curator and theorist, Ursula Biemann (https://www.geobodies.org) to the conversation; Ursula has thematized energy and environment themes extensively in her work. We start with oil and her 2005 project, Black Sea Files (https://www.geobodies.org/art-and-videos/black-sea-files) which explores how energy infrastructure shapes flows of fuel and people in the Caspian region. We discuss the multiperspectival camera work that is one of her signatures and move from there to Forest Law (2014) which contrasts the logics of oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon with indigenous cosmology of the living forest (https://www.geobodies.org/art-and-videos/forest-law). We talk about forests as future proliferating ecologies, how film can make visible connections between processes and places across the world, and why she likes to think of her films as doing work opposite to abstraction. We move then to Deep Weather (2013), a short film that connects the tar sands of northern Canada to the “hydro-geography” of an increasingly flood-threatened Bangladesh (https://www.geobodies.org/art-and-videos/deep-weather). In closing, Ursula explains to us her next project: founding a university in Ecuador to help bridge indigenous and western forms of environmental knowledge. Listen and enjoy! Ps Wishing Ms. Brijzha Boyer a very happy birthday!