coe170_biemann.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:22] Welcome back to a Happy Birthday edition of the Cultures of Energy podcast here. Happy Birthday! A younger, younger daughter, Bridget Boyer, has turned 10 today. Listeners in a pretty awesome 10. She is,

Speaker2: [00:00:36] Yeah, an excellent 10. And the funny thing is, is that she was really she's been sort of lamenting turning 10 for a while. She's been talking about, I don't know where she got this. Did you insert this idea into her head that she's like, I'll never be single digits again now? I mean, you're not melancholy about it, exactly. But she says, you know, I'll never be a single digit again. And I said, Well, but you might be triple digits at some point.

Speaker1: [00:01:01] This is something that matters to like kids who go to stem focused schools, write the kind of math.

Speaker2: [00:01:06] And you know what? You know, what's so funny is that the first time she said that, which was probably two months ago or so when the when the birthday was pending impending? Yeah, I remembered having that same sentiment when I was turning 10, and I remember it very, very vividly. I was down in Santa Barbara. I was staying with my grandma, who I called little grandma, little grandma and little grandpa. And when I stayed with them, they lived in this apartment and they had a sofa that did a fold out bed. So I'd always sleep in the fold out bed when I would go visit them and I turned 10 there. But I remember being in the living room and be like, Oh, I'll never be single digits again. It's like the loss of childhood. It was like really sort of maudlin and it wasn't quite tragic, but I was very tuned into it. She's not as maybe as tuned into it, but it's interesting. Did you have that same thing when you turn 10? Do you remember this?

Speaker1: [00:02:00] Well, first of all, I think that's prescient and the probably a factor of being an intelligent child that you can actually like project ahead and say, maybe I will be sad about this moment. You know, 20 years from now, I think you are probably depressed because you were on a fold out bed.

Speaker2: [00:02:14] That's depressing. Well, and I love them for that.

Speaker1: [00:02:18] But that would be the bigger thing I would bring out because I remember sleeping on many uncomfortable, foldout sofa beds over the years.

Speaker2: [00:02:24] And but when you're nine, you really don't care. It's like an

Speaker1: [00:02:27] Adventure. But I also think, you know, my feeling about childhood that I had at the time was, you just kind of being ruled by weirdos and I'd be happy to grow up as fast as possible and be doing my own thing.

Speaker2: [00:02:40] But I told Bridget last night because she was lamenting it again, she's like, Oh, it's only a few hours until I, you know, I'm going to be 10 and it's like, I don't want to turn 10. She's like, Then everyone's going to take me seriously because I'm 10, which is kind of hilarious, like, Oh my god, now I have to be a grown up because I'm 10.

Speaker1: [00:02:57] It's funny because there was a news media truck pulled out in front of the house this morning and there was a reporter out there who was like, We need to get your take on a couple of local issues. And she was like, I'm not ready to go public. Don't make me go on camera about this yet. Do that one. I'm 12, I said.

Speaker2: [00:03:14] She said, Yeah, I'm not ready. It was going to take me. Take me. You can't be a kid anymore. I guess she has. She thinks that like 10 needs a big something in the adult world. I mean, you have to behave like, I don't know, like a thirty seven year old. Yeah, but I told her I was like, I remember this the drama of kind of turning 10. And I said, But I will tell you, I was like, I was like anxious about it when it was happening. And I was like, Oh, this is such a big deal. It's that momentous. It's the decade, and even adults do kind of celebrate or lament the decades, right? I'm twenty. That's right. Oh, I'm thirty. Oh my God, I'm 40. You know, it goes like that. So there's something about the decade old, Oh yeah, that matters.

Speaker1: [00:03:52] Oh yeah. And that goes on to this day, as we know.

Speaker2: [00:03:54] Totally. And that's so this is her first decadal. But I was like, I'll tell you, I I remember feeling anxiety about that or worried or sad or whatever. And I said, but since that time, like since turning 10, I've never, ever thought about it again, right? Like, you realize actually that 24 hours later that still no one's taking you seriously.

Speaker1: [00:04:14] Well, we'll test this older daughter Olivia is turning 20 next. Oh, all right, this year. So so that's a big one, too. So we'll see. We'll see whether this decadal thesis holds up. Yeah. So I think we should probably just follow up really briefly on the Deer Park Fire from last week because we were talking about that quite a bit and just say that it is burned out. We had a town hall at Rice this past weekend, co-organized by a bunch of local environmental organizations. And, you know, from listening to the people who came out there, it's clear that two things like one that despite the fact that everyone was saying, Oh no, it's so safe, you know, good weather and the smoke plume went way up into the air and didn't affect conditions on the ground. The number of people who are there talking about their kids with headaches and nosebleeds for three days like suggests to me that that is not the case, that there has been severe compromise of bodily health at the local level here, especially in the areas right around right around the Deer Park plant. And you know, the other thing that we would note is that the county voted to authorize a lawsuit. Just good, except the cap on damages, which is set by the state of Texas is something like a couple of million dollars, so. So there's no way. Oh yes. And they say, Oh, the other thing people were saying at the town halls, they sent out these mobile medical, this mobile medical units to give people care. But they were doing things like giving people aspirin. They weren't actually taking blood samples that would have then allowed people to know what they were exposed to. So it's like precisely this kind of Band-Aid, fake, fake medical care and forbearance period. And I think, you know, the county needs to take more responsibility, frankly, for that too. And they need to not only hold them accountable for damages, but actually set up real plans to deal with disasters like this. Because, you know, many of us believe that the whole Houston ship channel is a time bomb.

Speaker2: [00:06:08] Well, did you mention that residents are filing suit to already have?

Speaker1: [00:06:12] Yeah, there'll be class action.

Speaker2: [00:06:13] Many residents have already

Speaker1: [00:06:15] Started, but I think they're going to they're going to still face the same damages going up. So yeah, multiple lawsuits are, I guess, better than one lawsuit. But I still think there's really just structural problems up and down legal problems that have to be addressed. So anyway, that's the update, not a particularly good one other than the fact that the fire is over now. And hopefully this, though, is something that will not be allowed to be swept under the rug.

Speaker2: [00:06:38] Well, a maybe not unrelated but different kind of disaster unfolding that was hard to watch. Was this flooding in the Midwest on the Pine Ridge Reservation? Oh yeah. Where people were like stuck in their houses, couldn't get out, couldn't drive with the roads, were all flooded for days and days and days. They couldn't get in emergency medical supplies or food or all kinds of stuff, and people were having to canoe in and ride in by horseback into these more remote areas of the Pine Ridge Reservation. So that was pretty troubling stuff, too. I mean, people pulled together and were able to get food out to, you know, their neighbors and friends and family and stuff. But it was pretty pathetic how little government intervention was able to help in that case.

Speaker1: [00:07:28] And they're projecting from massive flooding along the entire Mississippi basin.

Speaker2: [00:07:32] Yeah, the whole Mississippi basin. I mean, they have these charts to of, you know, and you know, maybe not that many lives have been lost, but it's I mean, there's huge agricultural losses. You know, these stories are interviews with farmers. I mean, you know, beyond the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the damages were seems also like all these. And you know, probably some of them are industrial farms with some of them are more family farms and they're just like, we're never going to be able to recuperate crazy stuff like these giant chunks of ice the size of like a semi truck cruising through on this raging water, right? Yeah, it's pretty apocalyptic. But you know, I was realizing because like looking at the story in Pine Ridge, like they used horses to get in there. So I think, you know, this is like the new horse riders of the apocalypse. Here's, you know, Oglala Sioux folks coming in with their backpacks like on horseback carrying and provisions, right?

Speaker1: [00:08:30] Right, right. So right. So I also wanted to note we have a fabulous guest on the podcast today. The artist, essayist and curator Ursula Beeman, who has been doing work over the past, I guess, is 20 years now that really explores ecologies of oil and water and ice across the world. And we talked to her in particular about a couple of projects that folks who may be in the petro culture circles know about. One is called Black Sea Files that was in 2005 and then deep weather in 2013, and Forest Law, which is a newer piece in 2014. The work is really vivid and striking, but she also involves fieldwork in it. So there's this fascinating way in which she's out exploring and documenting these phenomena. Whether it's the building of a new pipeline and the kinds of resource mobilizations and human mobilizations that involves, or in the case of forest law, the entanglements of oil industry with indigenous livelihoods and forms of knowledge in Ecuador. And this doesn't come until the end. Spoiler alert, but but we have a really interesting discussion at the end about her new project, which is, I think, like still another way of conceiving of the art can impact the world. She's working to help form a new university in Ecuador. Yeah, that's one that's trying to bring together western and indigenous forms of knowledge around ecology and environmental issues. So I think that's a fascinating project to really inspiring, inspiring work in beautiful and in the liner notes. For this episode, we're going to put the links to these films. So one thing you might consider doing is checking them out a little bit before listening, just so you have a sense of what we're talking about

Speaker2: [00:10:16] Pleasure or for teaching

Speaker1: [00:10:18] Author information

Speaker2: [00:10:19] Or for information.

Speaker1: [00:10:21] Ten minutes.

Speaker2: [00:10:21] Yeah, edutainment, sometimes getting information can be pleasurable.

Speaker1: [00:10:25] Dominic Boyer, I'm a I'm a lifelong learner. I'm a community of learners and educators.

Speaker2: [00:10:32] I'm going to send you. You should be on the highest school board.

Speaker1: [00:10:35] That's right. There's a plurality of Dominick's that are learning and educating at all times. Oh my god, that's so true. So what else is going on? Oh, tell us we want to hear about your trip to the recycling plant. That's what we need to hear about. Oh yeah. So what did you learn about recycling? Give us like a couple of quick pieces of information about the actual life of recycling.

Speaker2: [00:10:54] All right. Well, I'll tell you, there's a kind of paradox in recycling, but one that we can support, I think, and that is is that it is a for profit industry. Ok. And so, you know, as we were asking our interlocutor, not really a tour guide. She's a professional. She's like the PR person for the company and she's super good at what she does. But you know, we're saying, how can we get more people to recycle from like eco environmental point of view, how can we get people to not throw aluminum cans into the trash? Is what we were asking. And you know, why don't you do more public service announcements, et cetera? And she's like, Well, but we have to tread the line between sort of advertising our own company and encouraging people essentially to give to their bottom line, which is what you do when you're recycling. Right. So the city pays some amount to use these centers, right? And I don't know how the truck works. I'm not exactly. I think that the city pays for the truck to go around and get your stuff. So we have single stream recycling here in Houston, which is fairly recent, and they have this very complex and fascinating plant that processes everything, and it has to be able to process everything from like a little, you know, tiny tissue paper esque kind of light form of paper to, you know, a heavy paint can. Yeah. And people put all kinds of crazy shit in the recycling. It turns out she told us about they found a was a python or was it a boa constrictor? They found a live snake.

Speaker1: [00:12:22] Some put a snake in the recycling bin.

Speaker2: [00:12:24] I guess they thought that it was. It could have been that the snake got out and just ended up in the bin, which is what I think. I can't imagine someone's idiot enough to put their live animal in the recycling. Well, they found there was somewhere like here at the center. Someone put a wedding dress on the recycling. I guess they thought it could be recycled. Or maybe it was a commentary.

Speaker1: [00:12:42] Make a new film called Snakes in the bin.

Speaker2: [00:12:44] Snakes in the bed. Wedding dresses in the bed. So people put crazy shit in the recycling. And there's actually a lot of human labor that goes into it. So they have this plant and these machines that do things like suck up plastic bottles, like with super vacuum suckers that pull up these plastic bottles and send them off in one direction and pull the cardboard in another direction and blow paper up into another VAT. And then they bail everything like they bail together the cardboard and the paper. I guess the takeaway message here is like if you're if you think like your dad does that they're not actually recycling the stuff that you send their way. Believe me, they are because anything that they can recycle, they will because they make a profit off of it. That's good news.

Speaker1: [00:13:31] So they sell because I worry. I'll just say, let me just jump in. The one thing I worry about is that these rumors I hear, Oh no, they don't sound it all.

Speaker2: [00:13:38] Oh, no, no, they don't. They want to extract everything they can. Not because they're good environmental citizens, necessarily, but because they're making a profit for their shareholders, which is the greatest calling of all.

Speaker1: [00:13:51] So is this all some kind of pro-capitalist rant that we're getting into here? Is that where you go?

Speaker2: [00:13:55] No, no. I meant that ironically, I had scare quotes around the phrase

Speaker1: [00:14:00] Imaginary scare quotes.

Speaker2: [00:14:01] Listeners know it's like, you know, if they're not throwing your cardboard into the landfill because they want to sell your cardboard in a reprocessed form, because that's how they make their money. Yeah, and that's fair. So it's like, you know, it's just they're sort of a middle person in the cycle of, you know, moving your waste into something that can be reused. And so these plastic bottles can be remade into all kinds of things, including textiles and meshes and all kinds of industrial uses. Glass can be remade into industrial forms. The paper gets pulled, the cardboard gets popped and remade into things. Now, I guess some of the other very interesting thing that I heard is that, yeah, this was national. I believe that Americans only recycle about one third of the aluminum that they purchase, really, which is pretty pathetic. Yeah, and I'll tell you why. It's especially pathetic because aluminum, apparently it's just the quality of the metal. Its physical properties allow it to be pretty much infinitely recycled. Yeah. So she was saying like, the aluminum can that you're drinking out of today was originally made like 40 years ago, and it's been recycled so many times it doesn't lose its properties easily. So and that's in comparison

Speaker1: [00:15:14] To, say, Glass, where post-consumer use it has to go to like some industrial use,

Speaker2: [00:15:19] Right? I don't think she told us the life cycle of glass, but it was more like two or three turns of of, you know, living in some material form and before it has to become landfill and plastic has depending on what it gets remade into, like if it gets remade into like a jug or a paint container or whatever, it might have again, like two or three or four lives before it goes to the landfill. But aluminum is kind of magic, and it can keep going forever and can be remade and remade and remade. So the message is, if you want to convince your family members, you're doubting family members. And here I'm thinking of your dad again. Don't deny it.

Speaker1: [00:15:59] Oh, he's a terrible environmental subject.

Speaker2: [00:16:02] If you if you want to convince them that in fact, the recycling is getting recycled and not going straight into landfill, just remind them, Oh, believe me, it's going into recycling because these corporations, these companies are making a profit from the recycling. So they're motivated, right? That's a good, like, rational market orientation. Remind them of that. And then if you're going to recycle one thing aluminum,

Speaker1: [00:16:28] There you go. That's a good message. I like that. And also, I always think that, you know, although I love glass and a lot of ways aesthetically, and it's pretty and I love the memories of like the kind of glass bottles of milk showing up that we would then, you know, return the next week. It's true that glass is much heavier than aluminum, so their energy costs to moving it around.

Speaker2: [00:16:47] That was a big

Speaker1: [00:16:48] Part of the lifecycle energy of the substance. I think even though aluminum is is really bad, the first time you make it requires a lot of energy to smelt it. Once it's there, all the

Speaker2: [00:16:58] More reason to recycle

Speaker1: [00:16:59] It. Right, exactly. So some good thoughts. There are so many how thank you. That is actually a PSA public service announcement on this week's podcast. And I'm going to immediately after editing and putting out this podcast, I'm going to go right to my dad a heartfelt note about why he should not just, you know what? It's not a principled position. He's just a lazy man who's distracted and just throws everything in the garbage. I just want to make that clear. It's not because he says he doubts the recycling industry because he knew he.

Speaker2: [00:17:27] He does doubt the recycling because he said that he said that to your mom, like, you know, I think they just throw it all in the

Speaker1: [00:17:33] Landfill, a convenience.

Speaker2: [00:17:34] Now we know now we know that in fact, they're not because, you know, they got shareholders to answer to. And so they want to extract as much recyclable material out of your bin as they can.

Speaker1: [00:17:45] You know, I'm going to bet recycles her materials in a very diligent and probably creative fashion. Ursula Beeman.

Speaker2: [00:17:52] I bet so. So she would never throw a live snake in there or a wedding dress?

Speaker1: [00:17:57] No, unless it was part of a project, an art project. And actually, I have to say, like, the snake thing is amazing, and I would love it if some kid was like mom and dad say, I can't have my snake anymore. Maybe some other family will get it if I put it in the recycling bin. I hope that's what happens.

Speaker2: [00:18:12] Well, and because there's a lot of human labor before it goes through all these

Speaker1: [00:18:16] Systems and snake labor,

Speaker2: [00:18:18] People know like a person picked up the snake, it was on the conveyor belt and a person saw the snake there and had to pick it up.

Speaker1: [00:18:26] I hope that snake finally got home. If that snake hasn't found a good home, I would recycle it by bringing it to our home recycled, recycled companion

Speaker2: [00:18:34] Species on it and probably rinse it off. But then, sure, well, it's been with a bunch of nasty old milk and poor Diet Coke,

Speaker1: [00:18:41] And it's kind of bad for that snake.

Speaker2: [00:18:43] Well, pieces of newspaper,

Speaker1: [00:18:44] But it's a survivor. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:18:46] All right. On that note, we should say Go Ursula. Hello, listeners, cultures of energy listeners, we are here with the wonderful and brilliant Ursula Beeman. It's good to have you on the line, Ursula.

Speaker3: [00:19:20] Thank you for having me.

Speaker2: [00:19:21] Ursula is a multimedia video, essayist and visual artists that's been doing some fabulous work in moving images and textual evocations of really important issues that have to do with energy and environment and politics and petro cultures. And we're really excited to be talking to you today, Ursula.

Speaker1: [00:19:41] We sure are. And Ursula, I think your work is probably well known to many of us in the energy humanities. You are a distinguished guest, I believe, at the very first Petro Cultures conference over a decade ago. Now it's hard to imagine. Well, in part because of this marvelous film you did called the Black Sea files, and I wanted to start there and ask you if you could tell us a little bit about how you became interested in oil because this has been something of a of a through line in your work over the past, I guess, 15 years. Did you have an interest in oil before the Black Sea project, or is it something that kind of came to you as you were contemplating life in the 21st century?

Speaker3: [00:20:23] I was actually mostly visual geographer almost at that time as an artist, you know? And I was I was co-creating an artistic research project with two others, basically about trans cultural geographies. It was very vague, very general title, but we were looking at different infrastructures. I think it's the infrastructures that interested me most. One of the artists was looking at the corridors and highway networks, with everything had to do with this post socialist era, where Europe started to really position itself towards these huge post socialist territories that had opened up. And I was getting more and more interested in in the caucuses because they created this. They had this huge plan to create an infrastructure, including highways, pipelines, fibreglass networks that would reconnect to the former communist countries of Central Asia to Europe, basically. So it was a huge enterprise with with very big consequences. That's what I was interested in. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:21:51] Well, it's a fascinating project and an incredibly moving film because you you follow the oil. Part of the geography you trace is the the lines of the pipeline itself, and you interact with the materiality of that infrastructure, but also with the people who surrounded at various points. And so it's a fascinating juxtaposition of the mobility and displacement of people as well as the the planned motion of oil. Was that the intention from the beginning, that juxtaposition? Or was it something that evolved through the course of the ethnography

Speaker3: [00:22:25] That evolved during the course of the ethnography because there was there was practically no information to be found before leaving? This whole part of the world was really not online, you know? Yeah. So I had to go and find out what was going on, and I was definitely more interested in the human geography because I knew that the official representation of these oil pioneering projects had to do with the adventure of technology and so on. So I felt I needed to strongly present a counter representation to that sort of image making.

Speaker1: [00:23:05] Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:23:06] One thing I knew, theoretically, is that the movement of resources like oil and others and the movement of people, they were sort of intertwined. But I don't think there was any artwork or any film existing at that time that would actually work on this in the field to to bring these two things together. And so that was another really important point of this project for me.

Speaker1: [00:23:35] And it creates these incredibly moving but also kind of uncomfortable moments I felt as I watched the film. I mean, you are lingering on moments of pain and displacement. And you know, one of the things that really struck me, even though the film this moment in the film also kind of has an amusing character to it is where you're talking to the Azerbaijani sex workers and the pimps are trying to convince her to talk to you. And she's clearly resisting. And they're saying, Oh, you know, this is this is a woman who travels the world and she just likes to make movies. This is her hobby, and it was almost, you know, it was this really moving moment about the affect that surrounds people who both follow the promise of the pipeline, but also those who are kind of cast aside as it goes through.

Speaker3: [00:24:20] That's so very true. And you know, these informations about what was being said in the in the interview behind my back is is something that I found out only during the translation of the film, much later when I was sitting at my editing table. So what I'm what I'm documenting is a moment of total confusion of mis misleading information in all direction of very untruthful translations, you know? It shows the confusion of being in the field. It's nothing like what the news media tried to explain to you that everything is kind of ready to be consumed. Everything is very is heavy with confusing experiences, right? And the whole process of making sense of it, of making sense of what I saw and experience in the field is really happening at the editing table.

Speaker2: [00:25:19] Hmm, that's really interesting. Of course, you couldn't understand exactly what was being said until you see it in translation there. That must add a different cast to the process, too. Was there a moment then when you wanted to rethink how you sort of articulated the film or how you pieced it together at the editing table knowing this information when you did?

Speaker3: [00:25:40] Yeah. Well, I gave it a more important place, let's say, because I started to understand that the lives that I was told by the pimps was also the kind of lies that he tells the prostitutes, you know? And so in the beginning, I had I just filmed the gestures because they were so uncomfortable on their beds and everything, and I thought this would already be an interesting thing. But when they started to speak, of course, that's when I felt this really starts to fit into the overall project in a whole in much more powerful way now.

Speaker1: [00:26:19] Did you approach the field work process for black see files in a similar way to how you did later films like Forest Law and did this serve in some ways as a prototype for future practice? Or did you approach the projects very differently?

Speaker3: [00:26:34] Trying to remember? I had already done a number of field works that had to do with with sex work and trends in Southeast Asia and along the u.s.-mexico border, so that that was definitely a topic that was already very familiar with. So that's probably why I integrated it in a pipeline project, which really seems to have nothing to do with it, right? Right. I think Black File was a major territorial research in a much more conscious way than than I did before, possibly. I continued to produce a number of other works that related more to the mobility, transnational migration, to the kind of illegal legal migration hubs in the Sahara. Much more in this kind of creating the global interconnection between things and events, whereas afterwards, I think that as soon as I started to turn definitely to to materials or with the ecology around the ecologies of materials like Egyptian chemistry or, you know, later works with this turned to materialism, I think I started to change. Also, my how can I say, my discursive structural ideas behind the videos meaning were a lot less less geographical in in its structure, in a structural understanding of the world, then ecological Ursula.

Speaker2: [00:28:17] I also wanted to speak with you a bit about the aesthetics of the film work that you've done. And there's, of course, there's variation within it, but there seems to be a common aesthetic that you have worked with and enjoyed, and that is the kind of the larger frame with the smaller frame inset on the side. Trying to describe it without making it clear to listeners. So you kind of have these parallel images occurring that are coordinated with one another that is there more or less at the same site, but I think just shot from a different angle. That's how I interpret it. I'm thinking of in forest law in particular, shot from a different angle. Can you talk to us a bit about how you decided to take up that aesthetic form or what it does conceptually for the work itself, having those sort? Multidimensional mirrors occurring on screen.

Speaker3: [00:29:10] Yes. Black Sea files, too is is already a two channel video project as synchronized to Channel Video Project, where the two screens relate to one another. They don't show the same themes. They complement each other in very complex ways with forest law, which is the one on the Ecuadorian Amazon. We shot, I mean, because I went with another artist or architect, Paolo Tavares. We had the opportunity to take two identical cameras with us and then shoot from two angles, the interviews and many other things as well. So in in the exhibition space, these two screens are presented side by side. They create a spatial effect where one is smaller and further into the space towards the viewer and the other one much larger and against the wall. So it creates a spatial interaction in a way of this of the figures that speak in the film. And of course, that has also to do with perspective. And, you know, it relates to Latin American theory in a way.

Speaker2: [00:30:33] Yeah, that's really interesting. And in fact, hearing it how it would be laid out in the exhibition space is really helpful because it's it's interesting on the screen, you know, sort of watching it on a on a computer screen. But I can see the powerful effect of being in that space and creating that speciality between these different figures as their as their interactions are unfolding in the forest and they're speaking and sharing information. Forest law is a really wonderful piece that you did a few years ago, and as you said, it takes up this question of extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon and among Saracho on the Saracho Reservation or Park. And what they're facing in this situation is an extractive industry, oil extraction. And there's the corporation who wants to do the extraction is placing these explosives in order to, I guess, sort of plump for oil if I have that right. And it's really interesting how we see this unfolding story of the arguments that Sara people are able to make to the court itself about the classification of explosives. So in in one classification of explosives and their danger to humans, you know, nearby the a classification are the most dangerous are those that are very, very proximate to human beings. And the B classification would be an explosive that's sort of in a building slightly remote from people and say it would be a set of explosives that are very far away and therefore less threatening.

Speaker2: [00:32:07] And the way that the court, originally or the corporation originally argued it was that these explosives were far away from Saracho habitation and therefore less dangerous and therefore permissible. And yet they end up Kiriakou end up making the argument that in fact, because it's within their territory, because it's a sacred space and because they work with and live with the Earth in a very particular way that in fact placing these explosives where where they are is precisely like putting the explosive on their very bodies. And I was really struck by this, and it really fits in with the rest of the narrative here, where they're making a legal claim that you know that the Earth is a sentient living organism and that their territory, the spaces, the natural spaces where they live are really fundamental in a way that can't be monetized in the way that a corporate estate sort of model would be. So all of that is to say, you know, again, it's a it's a kind of ethnographic and documentary film, and I'm wondering how how you came across the case, whether it emerged or unfolded during the time you were there, or if there were other dramatic events that you recall in making this film and putting it together?

Speaker3: [00:33:26] Well, you're addressing a lot of different issues here, all at the same time, and they can all be connected to Saracho as this really emblematic juridical case. We actually it's very complicated to contact indigenous people from afar. That's one of the reasons we went first to the south of Ecuador, and there was a very dramatic event right there, actually, that had a meaning for the course of our investigation because they had an environmentalist that had just been killed literally like three days before B A. Arrived, and so we thought first, this might be a real problem because they might have a lot of other other problems on the mind and don't want to speak with US filmmakers, but they had organized a press conference in the forest village there to bring attention to this crime. And there were a lot of important people who had to to the to the shore territory to attend the press conference. They were lawyers from from Quito coming, and they were two people from Saracho as well. And that's where we had the chance to actually meet them and ask if he could come to the territory and have an interview with the chief of Saku.

Speaker3: [00:34:57] I don't think without this dramatic event, we would we would not have been able to go there. So sometimes in the field because you're there, you also trigger a lot of new opportunities or problems that make film possible or not. You know, it's fieldwork is like that. So I think that's for me always a new apprenticeship about how I impact the making of these worlds while I'm there the camera. And it's not something that can be documented as something that exists already, you know, beforehand. And that's how I see my role as a filmmaker, really as part of this world making process. The explosive story in Sciacca was so dramatic for them because it also affected a zone that is sacred where they don't even walk themselves in the forest, which is basically for the reproduction of species. And the company had laid a whole grid of seismic explosives to find out how deep in the soil the oil is located, basically. But of course, it ranges the wildlife, and it's it's a huge impact on the life there in the forest.

Speaker2: [00:36:22] Yeah, I think this is the explosives example. As you said, it was really dramatic, and it's also striking from a legal point of view. I mean, not that I'm a legal scholar or an attorney or anything, but whether the the case, the the Saku are making that we hear about it. The beginning of the film is whether the Earth or this particular biotic forest space is a corporate estate, right? The kind of framing of a corporate estate that can then be extracted and monetized, or whether it's a sentient living organism. And so this is a really important contrast, of course. And on the podcast, we've spoken, you know, with other guests about the kind of making making of natural dynamics or places like rivers and glaciers, mountains, giving them the legal status of personhood. And so this was a really interesting example of that. I think perhaps personhood wasn't the legal classification that was used, but this idea that the explosives that were in the sacred space were actually on kind of literally on the body of Saracho people is another interesting kind of twist on the personhood legal argument, it seems to me. And so it's really fascinating.

Speaker3: [00:37:39] Well, it has to do with the total interconnection between the understanding of self and the territory as a living entity. Mm hmm. That is a fact opposition to the whole private property scheme that our whole legal system is based on. And I think that is where where this film kind of connects the the problem between private property and the consequences it has eventually for the climate when we continue to destroy these places, you know?

Speaker2: [00:38:15] Yeah, yeah. Really? Well, put. That's actually a nice segue to to the towards the end of the film we hear. I mean, there's subtitles in the film because a lot of the conversation is in Spanish, but we hear a voice in English at the end, a woman's voice. Maybe it's your voice. I'm not sure of a woman's voice where we hear that the forest is a future proliferating ecology. And I thought that this was a really wonderful formulation, future proliferating ecology. I wonder if you could speak a bit about what is meant by that or how that sort of creates a generative possibility in thinking through forests as not just living organisms, but as future organisms and future spaces.

Speaker3: [00:39:04] Yes, I mean that this is my boy said. It's my video as a guest voice with which always comes in as this moment of authorial voice. It is a sequence taken from Edward Ocon's how force think because interestingly, his his book and his research is about a valley that is just about two valleys away from Saracho, where we were doing the research. So our cases were very connected in a way. And we found his book Upon Hour Upon our return from Ecuador and reading it. I was really fascinated by his way of connecting to see, let's say, to see evolution as a form of thinking because you're always guessing what comes next, right to be better adapted to the challenges of the natural environment. And and so it's a very future oriented drive, and that's how I wanted to include it. Also in in this narrative on the forest as as a living entity, not only, you know, from the voice of indigenous people who live in the forest, but also from a more theoretical perspective. In this case, it's more like a semiotic.

Speaker2: [00:40:36] Mm hmm. That's great. Yeah. And we had we had Eduardo on the pod.

Speaker1: [00:40:40] I was going to say, happy coincidence. We just had Eduardo on the podcast. And so he's fresh in our memories. And especially one thing that he observed was that he connected, you know, the preponderance of kind of abstract, symbolic symbiosis in Western civilization to its kind of Anthropocene trajectory and its general sense of treating nature as a as a resource for its own industrial enterprises. And that reminded me a lot of again, just to go back to Black Sea files for one quick moment to something you queried and your narrative there, which was how to resist freezing the moment into a symbol. It feels to me as though you've had this affinity to kind of a Canadian Procyon type of semiotic thinking for quite a while, and in some ways your work really anticipates it. And I wanted to put this in a form of a question that maybe cuts across several of the films you've been working on. You ask at one point or observed in another interview that there's no simple way of telling the story of oil, which is certainly true, and we seem to be hampered a bit by our individualism and our kind of very focused local kind of hyper local perspective on things. Whereas your films what they what they all seem to do, at least the ones I've had the had the opportunity to watch is they seem to connect places, times and spaces to one another, whether, you know, through a kind of narrative of of mobility and transit following the infrastructure, so to speak in Black Sea files or in terms of the juxtapositions between the tar sands and the Ecuadorian Amazon that you do in, oh, I'm sorry, I'm confusing deep, whether rather deep, whether in Bangladesh different film where you connect the tar sands of Canada to Bangladesh, rising sea level. So do you see and again, I don't know if this has to do with the dual camera work or the perspective, as you mentioned before. But do you see part of your filmmaking as trying to connect places to one another so that we can help to visualise and understand these interconnections?

Speaker3: [00:42:42] Absolutely. I mean, that's the only way we can really understand them is and they're not. I mean, usually I have to say that's how I start with new works. Usually, I'm interested in some philosophical writing. And from there, I try to think where? Where on earth could I go to start visualizing and really understanding how this works kind of underground? And, you know, in in in forest law, obviously, we we discuss with our law what are the cases we are we could be engaging in what are the what is the research we could find on the ground that would start helping us understand the meaning today of Michelle cells, the natural contract, for instance? Mm hmm. So this is how we start. Not so much like a documentary film where you say, Oh, they're terrible things happening somewhere. Let's go and document that it's always a kind of a philosophical project.

Speaker1: [00:43:46] But in that project, you do want to resist this kind of symbolic overture to abstract something from its context. It seems to me the films are very index cycle in that way, right? They like to follow relations.

Speaker3: [00:43:59] They do the opposite of abstract. They they bring back the micro politics on. The ground into larger philosophical sort, this is this is the project, although a Black Sea files, I started, actually there was nothing to indicate where I could start working. I had to go and do all the groundwork before I could start assembling everything. So in that sense, maybe that film still was a bit of a different story. And also I came back not knowing what I had done. And even at the moment of opening of the opening of the first exhibition in Berlin of Black Sea Files, the the curator, Anselm Frank, asked me, What did you do here? Ursula and I said, I have no idea. And I think it's because 2005 was really early for this discourse, and it was also kind of early on in the territorial research in art. And so I was a bit tapping in the dark what I could make of this today. Of course, it would be a very different story because we have something like petro cultures, right? And a huge body of theory and artistic practices that you could look at, you know?

Speaker2: [00:45:21] Yeah, I wanted to kind of segue way over to a conversation that you had about your work at the time, a series of works that you had a conversation with Andrew Penn. Yes, I think that's how you pronounce his surname. I've never said it out loud. I know him, but you had a conversation with Andrew Paddock's and you're talking about oil and the kind of aesthetics and representation. And one of the things you begin with in this conversation is a juxtaposition or a kind of parallel discussion between oil and water. Of course, the kind of classic sort of refusal of the combination of those two liquid substances. And you begin to talk about oil and plastics, and oil is a mineral resource that maybe has certain resistances to representation, but also oil as a kind of discursive media that gets articulated in economic and industrial terms. And you say that oil is actually beyond substance or in addition to its substantive material, viscous liquid form. It's a corporate substance as well. And I wanted to ask you how how we might think about corporate substances. I mean, oil might be one example. I don't know if you have other examples or ways of thinking through how to kind of conceptualize or define a corporate substance. How do we how do we know it when we see it?

Speaker3: [00:46:50] I really don't know. I mean, Andrew made this interview for I mean, he he was a professor. I think of professor in the Economics Department of Singapore. So he focused on this. It's true that I'm not it's not exactly my my specialty either. But it seemed to me from the not the amount of infrastructure that is necessary to actually extract it and to evacuate it and market. It is that the actual liquid the product in the end is so remote from any social historical realities of the place of extraction is that it becomes it just, you know, it's predestined to become the market to become a commodity. Mm hmm. And and hence it is is a corporate liquid. So you don't need to bottle it and put a put a label on it to make it corporate, I guess. Yeah. I mean, this is what we tried to counteract. Also with the project, with the collective project world of Matter is that the original critique was that everything all the materials in the world or on Earth are just turned into resources for humans and that we start to have to start to look into the actual materiality themselves more and see how they can be activated. And so actually, my my work has turned more and more away from a critique of the corporate world towards a more engaged way of looking at alternatives to these developments. And I find in in forest law, the one of the people in Saracho who is speaking in the video, is lashing the palm tree there. To try to get some wood is that he's really it's a critique of the development discourse, you know, is about we don't we don't need all these products, all these signs of modernity. We're just perfectly. Fine, here in the forest, we have all we need, right?

Speaker2: [00:49:09] Yeah, there's a great scene with a healer or a an expert in medicinal plants. I'm not exactly sure how he would identify himself where he he puts on this kind of simple wooden table. All of these leaves and different pieces of plants that he's gathered from the forest, and he says something along the lines of like, you know, this is my pharmacy and I know how all of these, you know, the kind of the the chemical reactions and and properties that each of these plant items, these living, these living beings that are in the living forest are going to interact with a human body to heal it and make it well again.

Speaker3: [00:49:50] Right? He's a shaman. Mm hmm. And he's practicing ancestral medicine, but he's also he has also a doctor in medicine from a university as well. So he's both. Yeah. And these plants are actually part of his garden. So his garden looks like looks like the rainforest, but these plants are purposely planted there for his use. And so he he made some kind of performance. But then we asked him to just simply lay out the plants and tell us what they are and what they're for. And he started to do that. And I think for the for the video work, it worked perfectly well because it shows us the knowledge, the great knowledge they have of the forest and the botany and all these ecologists with with which they have co-evolved. Mm hmm. They belong to this forest ecology. And yeah, I think that's the beginning of other works that I start to think about now. But it was a really important moment for me to see.

Speaker2: [00:51:00] Mm hmm. And it really works particularly well. I think those those scenes in the by channel and the dual screen too, because we get a kind of intimacy with the plants themselves and with him, right? Kind of. At the same time, the

Speaker3: [00:51:13] Camera installed on top of the above the table shooting down onto the table where he starts adding plants and then the other shot is further away, where you can see him coming through the forest and approaching the table. So it's beautifully synchronized, I think.

Speaker2: [00:51:30] Yeah, yeah. No, it's very powerful. I wanted to go back to, I think, another theme that I've seen in your work and that and you mentioned the word infrastructure and we could begin. We could work with that word. I think, you know, in terms of pipelines and in the case of forest law, we hear about roads and trying to prevent roads from coming into the forest because with roads come other forms of extraction and development and everything that ensues. So I was curious. I mean, in the case of Azerbaijan or or in the case of Ecuador, as you're following the path of these of these substances, you know, oil or the kind of infrastructures that channel. For example, how do you decide where to stop following and to kind of, you know, cut the frame? Let me put that in more clear terms. How do you decide where, where to focus the attention in the work? And how do you decide how far out into the extremities of the infrastructural apparatus you want to go? I mean, we could go so far, as you know, to the courtrooms in Ecuador, right in Quito and back to the sacred place in Saracho. So how do you decide to scale the works and as you're developing each piece?

Speaker3: [00:52:45] Well, it's interesting that you would mention it because the court hearings with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is actually a video that Paolo prepared for a tabled where we arranged all the documents. So he created numerous documents, mostly maps and text documents with images combined and two videos that we were showing also projected from top down onto the table. One was the hearings where there was also a very interesting anthropologist who was explaining the Cosmo vision of these indigenous people to make sure that the justices in court actually understand what's important for for the ruling, right? And the other the other small video is about is an explanation of what Anthropocene is and what is it? A video recording of the opening that Michelle sells a kind of book launch and television. He explains his his book Natural Contract. So these are kind of very important background information and documents that we provide alongside. All right, the the two videos, the installation comprises all these plus we made a book with a lot of text by Paolo and the interviews and so on, which also circulates a great deal among indigenous populations. So I think that the project has various dimensions and various places of action.

Speaker2: [00:54:30] Yeah, I'm still also thinking. So Michelle, so did a book launch on French television. Yeah, that's kind of amazing. Yeah. France is a whole different world than the United States.

Speaker1: [00:54:40] Yes. It seems increasingly that way.

Speaker3: [00:54:43] There's a TV program on French television that that was called a. Even when I was living in the French part of Switzerland for many years, I watched it regularly and one of them was Michel says natural contract.

Speaker1: [00:54:58] So Ursula, I glossed over, stumbled over your also brilliant film deep. Whether it's a shorter film but a very powerful one that explores the hydro geographies of sea level rise and especially the impacts in Bangladesh, which is, you know, a place that is facing rising waters with a sense of existential precarity that may be stronger than almost any place on the planet. Again, was this a place where you were following the problem to the place, or was there another reason why you chose to work in Bangladesh?

Speaker3: [00:55:30] Yes, I felt that after doing all this work on migration, after 10 years of doing that, I felt I wanted to really switch to another subject matter and decided that water could be a good one. And I decided to go to Bangladesh because they have all water problems that you can imagine. Yes. And so I traveled there for a couple of weeks, but I saw a very small announcement or very small information somewhere that there were all these women, particularly women, actually the help fixing the dams in summertime or actually build them even by hand. And I always had this image in my head when I went there and I said, I have to go there, I have to go where that is happening. And it was far, far out and dealt a very difficult two days of travel to get there. But really, I came back from this whole trip of two weeks of filming, and that was the only scene the was using. But that in itself wasn't. It wasn't a video project yet, you know, it was just a scene. And when Simon invited me to come to Alberta to present Black Sea files and he said, We will take you to the tar sands. Oh, wow. And well, now I have a project. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It actually came the other way around that put the tar sands in the beginning, even though I filmed it two two years later. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:56:59] Well, it's very powerful, and it gives you a real sense for the, you know, the vast amount of human labor that's being expended to try to hold back the seas. And whether that's the physical labour of sandbagging or, let's say, the the labour of technocrats and the Netherlands. I mean, there's immense amount of labour that's that's being put into that and so much less so it seems to me sometimes in in the transition away from fossil fuels. So it's a striking juxtaposition to me. Ursula, I wanted to give you a chance to talk a little bit about projects that you might be working on now, things that you're excited about and if not projects and just themes. You know what we might be looking for from you in the years to come?

Speaker3: [00:57:39] Well, the project I'm working on right now is actually a direct follow up project from the research in Ecuador. I was invited to Colombia to do a new video project in the south of Colombia and went on a one month field trip that was led by an indigenous leader. And so we decided that instead of doing a film, another film that could be just like Forrest Lo, actually, I would rather work with him to create a university for them, create an indigenous university where we could integrate their indigenous cosmology and western science in a more intelligent way. Maybe then what is done elsewhere?

Speaker1: [00:58:26] So, wow, yeah, this is amazing. You have to tell us a little bit more about what is what would that look like in terms of its form?

Speaker3: [00:58:34] Well, I'm working with the architecture department here at the Etihad, at the Federal Technical Institute here of Science in Switzerland to create the architecture. But at the same time, I'm also working with a number of scientists, young scholars, you know, Colombian scholars to start creating a material archive that we could use then later for teaching, because right now, because of the disruption of the armed conflict. For many, for a couple of generations there, there is a bit of a discontinuity of the indigenous knowledge that has been handed down by generations, so we are trying to bridge that gap by doing a lot of ethnography and creating these materials again, that could be the basis for for teaching. Wow. So in a way, it's a continuation of a project for a slower just goes one step further, more into materialization and to actually institutionalize these ideas and see how we can, how we can tackle them in the real. You know, it's not so easy. So be working with some ecologists and environmental scientists. And then also with the elders, with the younger generation. And it will be a very involved project really for many years to come.

Speaker1: [01:00:02] It's an amazing project. Does it have a title at the moment?

Speaker3: [01:00:06] No, we just call it the Indigenous University because we are still kind of defining whether it should be just with one people or so. It should be include maybe several people who live there in the area. So it's going to be in the southwest. So it's a fairly it's a remote, but a very beautiful region that is actually the same kind of echo region as the one we described in forest lore, which is the connection between the Amazon Low Land and the Andes. So this this transitional zone is just so immensely biodiverse and it's worth creating a good social environment that can interact with this with this biosphere.

Speaker1: [01:00:52] Wow. And would it be fair to say that some of the spirit of this in terms of the trajectory of your own work is, you know, maybe the time has passed in which it's the crucial importance is to document petrol culture and its and its impacts. And maybe what's crucial in this moment is to create alternatives.

Speaker3: [01:01:10] Yeah, I think it has to do that. Shift to a more planetary vision also is a shift from critical to more to another attitude that can include care and connectivity and and solidarity. That kind of a different a different spirit really been the critical one, which is maybe still important and necessary, but it doesn't really need it doesn't really need a lead to an immediately better future. You know, so I prefer to work on on creating and creating an alternative.

Speaker2: [01:01:51] And and materializing that in visual forms and and powerful artistic forms, we think is one of the best ways to begin to do that. Kind of uncovering the labor that goes into it, not just the catastrophe, but the potentiality as well.

Speaker1: [01:02:06] So and I think artists should be running the world now anyway. I think our good, our good friend Ian Gardner, the Icelandic comedian who became the mayor of Reykjavik, convinced us that really artists are the most responsible people to be in charge of everything now. And I'd much rather see an artist helped to create a new university than a technocrat. Yeah, sure.

Speaker3: [01:02:27] Well, I think that's I was thinking, you know, who am I to create such a university? But on the other hand, you know, art is an extra disciplinary field, and I think it's it's actually quite well equipped to maybe bring these different ways together is different ways of thinking and doing that are not bound so much to the disciplinary format. So I think that, you know, why not? That's what comes out of it where

Speaker1: [01:02:57] We've tried, we've tried letting the corporations run the world and we see where that's gotten us. So let's get more now. More of that this century will be the artist running the world. Ursula, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Speaker3: [01:03:08] It's been so much for your wonderful questions.

Speaker1: [01:03:11] Yeah, it's been a great joy, and we hope to keep the conversation going in the years to come.

Speaker3: [01:03:17] Right. Thank you.