Panel 9 (Red Salon/ Volksbühne)
Petrofiction/ Petrofeminities
With Georgiana Banita (DE), Lukas Bärfuss (CH), Katharina Hagena (DE).
Moderation: Florian Auerochs
What does the term 'petrofiction' denote when referring to literary manifestations of oil in different genres? This question is addressed in the short lecture by Georgiana Banita, a renowned expert on oil and energy cultures.
As recent examples from German-language literature, we present a novel and a play. Katharina Hagena reads from her novel "Das Geräusch des Lichts" (The Sound of Light). Here, aurora seekers encounter the Canadian oil sands industry, and the mental image of the travellers becomes contaminated by the fossil fuel industry.
A staged reading serves as an introduction to the play "Öl" (Oil) by Lukas Bärfuss. This chamber play about the preconditions of using fossil fuels often obscured in everyday Western consumer life, presents a psychological portrait of the petroleum society from a female perspective.
Both texts situate oil exploration in a context of resource-colonial violence. The masculine connotation of oil exploration is contrasted with female protagonists who reject the fossil energy complex and/or disappear into it. In conversation with Georgiana Banita and Florian Auerochs, Katharina Hagena and Lukas Bärfuss discuss their experiences with writing about the oil complex.
Georgiana Banita is born in Romania. She is a lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at the Otto Friedrich University and submitted her postdoctoral thesis "Writing Oil: North American Literature in the Petroleum Age" to the University of Bamberg in 2020. She has published in major edited volumes associated with the Petrocultures Research Group, including "Oil Culture" (2014), "Fueling Culture. 101 Words for Energy and Environment" (2017), and "Petrocultures. Oil, Politics, Culture" (2017). Since 2020, she is leading the research project "Energy Revolution: A Media Analysis of the Expansion and Rescue of Wind Power."
Titles:
• Einführung: Was ist Petrofiction? (Introduction: What is Petrofiction?)
Katharina Hagena lives in Hamburg. She completed her doctorate on James Joyce's magnum opus "Ulysses" and her bestselling novel "The Taste of Apple Seeds" (2008), translated into 26 languages. "Das Geräusch es Lichts" is her third novel. In addition, Katharina Hagena has distinguished herself as a children's author and creative Joyce exegete and communicator.
Titles:
• Das Geräusch des Lichts (The Sound of Light), 2016
Lukas Bärfuss from Switzerland is one of the most important and most frequently performed contemporary German-language playwrights. He is also prolific as a novelist and essayist. In 2019, he received the Georg Büchner Prize. Time and again, Bärfuss manages to transform his characteristic "aesthetics of confrontation" (Peter von Matt) into an "aesthetics of responsibility" (Anke Detken) in his texts, which are both ethically and socially provocative. It is also the case in the play "Oil", which dramatically deals with our also psychosocial dependence on the fossil fuel market.
Titles:
• Öl (Oil), 2009