Panel 6 (Red Salon/ Volksbühne)
Pipeline Stories - Oil, Landscape, Climate Change
With Imre Szeman (CA) (prerecorded), James Mariott (GB), Rena Effendi (AZE/USA/TUR).
Moderation: Dariya Manova
Theory meets CO2, reportage meets pop art, photography toes the line between documentation and art — panels 6 and 7 emphasize once again the interdisciplinary character of the Climate Cultures Festival.
Let’s begin: in a 20-minute talk, a leading theorist of the petrocultures paradigm Imre Szeman will discuss some fundamental questions. After theory, again comes (as in panel 1) an application in process: British journalist and author James Marriott discusses with photographer Rena Effendi the line, and crossing of the line, between aesthetics and documentation.
Both have worked intensively along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and have produced exemplary work as a result. Marriott in a long-term reportage and Effendi on two separate journeys - first commissioned by BP photographing for a public relations campaign highlighting their corporate social responsibility program along the pipeline and then, on a longer, independent project, the environmental destruction as well as deep, socio-economic issues, prevalent along the route of this pipeline and its effects on lives of the people left behind the "great promise" of oil.
Imre Szeman is a professor of communication studies at the University of Waterloo and, more recently, an official "climate critic for the Green Party" of Canada. He is considered the discourse founder of Petrocultures and Energy Humanities.
Titles:
•On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy, 2019
James Marriott is a journalist, author and member of "platform London" - a network that connects art, activism, education, and research. His new book "Crude Britannia" is petrocriticism in the form of a cultural-geographical journey around the world through the history of oil in Britain and all the cultures and countries that have been and are being affected by it.
Titles:
• Crude Britannia: How Oil Shaped a Nation (with Terry Macalister), 2021
• The Oil Road. Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London (with Mika Minio-Paluello), 2013
Rena Effendi is a documentary photographer. In her early work, she focused on the impact of the oil industry on people's lives. Originally from Azerbaijan, she now lives in Istanbul. Part of her work can be seen in the photo exhibition of the festival.
Titles:
•Liquid Land, 2013
•Pipe Dreams: A Chronicle of Lives Along the Pipeline, 2010