MIDNIGHT OIL
work in progress
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MIDNIGHT OIL is a long term project aiming to trace the twilight of oil during this new decade of 2020/2030. It focuses on the many and intersecting experiences of those who live by petrol’s law, whole communities that once enjoyed its voracious bonanza, and now are the first to witness its decay.
The development of the project started in 2019 in the Venezuelan regions of Zulia, La Guajira, and Falcón, in the midst of what appears to be an undercover civil war. Meanwhile political, humanitarian, and economic chaos is defacing the civil population, the largest refineries of the OPEC sit in disrepair due to institutional malpractice and western embargoes on PDVSA oil. Communities get caught in the shadows of the ruins that previously were the main source of income for everyone, now, in their last days as the US-led blockade makes them inoperable and volatile. Cities such as Maracaibo, tropical petro-jewel of yesteryear, appears phantasmagoric and hostile. Oil Pirates find ways of smuggling thousands of liters of the depleted Venezuelan refined gasoline through the Guajira desert in order to be speculated with in Colombia.
A haunting image of an age where this resource will be obsolete and the footprint it leaves behind is not only pressed by rusty oil wells sitting in the middle of the stormy lake, but by whole societies who must adapt to new ways of living among the metallic pyramids of the 20th century.
MIDNIGHT OIL is a long term project aiming to trace the twilight of oil during this new decade of 2020/2030. It focuses on the many and intersecting experiences of those who live by petrol’s law, whole communities that once enjoyed its voracious bonanza, and now are the first to witness its decay.
The development of the project started in 2019 in the Venezuelan regions of Zulia, La Guajira, and Falcón, in the midst of what appears to be an undercover civil war. Meanwhile political, humanitarian, and economic chaos is defacing the civil population, the largest refineries of the OPEC sit in disrepair due to institutional malpractice and western embargoes on PDVSA oil. Communities get caught in the shadows of the ruins that previously were the main source of income for everyone, now, in their last days as the US-led blockade makes them inoperable and volatile. Cities such as Maracaibo, tropical petro-jewel of yesteryear, appears phantasmagoric and hostile. Oil Pirates find ways of smuggling thousands of liters of the depleted Venezuelan refined gasoline through the Guajira desert in order to be speculated with in Colombia.
A haunting image of an age where this resource will be obsolete and the footprint it leaves behind is not only pressed by rusty oil wells sitting in the middle of the stormy lake, but by whole societies who must adapt to new ways of living among the metallic pyramids of the 20th century.