170 - Ursula Biemann

[Music] Welcome back to a Happy Birthday edition of the Cultures of Energy Podcast. That's cute, happy birthday. A younger daughter, Bridget Boyer, has turned 10 today, listeners. And a pretty awesome 10 she is. 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'll never be single digits again? Yeah, I mean, she's not melancholy about it exactly, but she says, "Oh, I'll never be a single digit again." And I said, "Well, but you might be triple digits at some point." This is something that matters to like kids who go to STEM-focused schools, right? They got a math authority. But you know what's so funny is that the first time she said that, which was probably two months ago or so, when the birthday was pending, impending. 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, 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 being like, "Oh, never be single digits again." And it's like the loss of childhood. It was like really sort of modeling. 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 turned 10? Do you remember this? Well, first of all, I think that's the press-y-ent. And 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 were probably depressed because you were on a fold out bed. That's depressing. Wow. I love that fold out bed. That would be the bigger thing I would bring out because I remember sleeping on many uncomfortable fold out so for beds over the years. But when you're not and you really don't care, it's like an adventure. But I also think, you know, my feeling about childhood that I had at the time was you're 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. But I told Bridja last night because she was lamenting it again. She's like, "Oh, it's only a few hours until I'm going to be 10." And she's like, "I don't want to turn 10." And she's like, "Then everyone's going to take me seriously because I'm 10." Which is kind of hilarious. Oh my god, now I have to be a grown-up because I'm 10. 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, "Gridja, we want you to get your take on a couple of local issues." And she's like, "I'm not ready to go public. Don't make me go on camera about this yet." I'm not ready. Do that one of '12." I said, "Yeah, I'm not ready." It was going to take me seriously. I can't be a kid anymore. I guess she thinks that 10 needs a big something. And the adult world, it means you have to behave like a, I don't know, like a 37-year-old. But I told her, I was like, "I remember the drama of turning 10." And I said, "But I will tell you." I was like, "I was anxious about it when it was happening." And I said, "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. I'm 20. That's right. I'm 30. Oh my god, I'm 40. It goes like that. So there's something about the decadal. Oh yeah. And that goes on to this day as we know. Totally. And this is her first decadal. But I was like, "I'll tell you, I remember feeling anxiety about that or worried or sad or whatever." And I said, "But since that time, since turning 10, I've never ever thought about it again." You realize actually that 24 hours later, that still no one's taking you seriously. Well, we'll test this. Older daughter Olivia is turning 20 next time. Oh my god. All right, this year. So that's a big one too. So we'll see whether this is decadal thesis holds up. So I think we should probably just follow it really briefly on the "Dear Park Fire" from last week, because we were talking about that quite a bit. I'd say that it has burned out. We had a town hall at Rice this past weekend, co-organized by a bunch of local environmental organizations. And from listening to the people who came out there, it's clear that two things, like one, that despite the fact that everyone's saying, "Oh no, it's so safe. 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 nose bleeds 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 the "Dear Park Plant." And the other thing that we would notice that the county voted to authorize a lawsuit, which is good, except the cap on damages, which is set by the state of Texas, is something like a couple of million dollars. So there's no way. Oh yes, and there's 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 was precisely this kind of band-aid fake medical care. And that's really the theory of it. And I think 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 many of us believe that the whole Houston Ship Channel is a time bomb. Well, did you mention that residents are filing suit 2? Already have. Yeah, there will be class actual lawsuits too. 20 or 30 residents have already started filing this. But I think they're going to still face the same damages count 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. Well, 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, where people were like stuck in their houses, couldn't get out, couldn't drive, but 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. And they're projecting from massive flooding along the entire Mississippi basin, yeah. The whole Mississippi basin, I mean, they have these charts too, you know, and maybe not that many lives have been lost, but it's in, I mean, there's huge agricultural losses. I know these stories are interviews with farmers, I mean, you know, beyond the Pine Ridge Reservation, where the damages were seen was also like all these, and, you know, probably some of them are industrial farms, and 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 with the apocalypse here. Yeah. A lot of you folks coming in with their backpacks, like on horseback carrying and provisions. Right. Right. So I also wanted to note we have a fabulous guest on the podcast today, the artist, essayist, and curator, Ursula Bimann, who has been doing work over the past, I guess it's 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 new or piece in 2014. The work is really vivid and striking, but she also involves field work in it. So there's this fascinating way, 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 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 way art can impact the world. So, she's working to help form a new university in Ecuador, that's one that's trying to bring together Western and indigenous forms of knowledge around ecology. environmental issues. I think that's a fascinating project to really inspiring, inspiring working beautiful and in the liner notes for this episode we're gonna put the links to these films. So one thing you might consider doing is checking them out a little bit before listening to see you have a sense of what we're talking about. - Yeah, pleasure or for teaching? - Or for information. - Or for information, to. - For education, yeah, education. Sometimes getting information can be pleasurable and dominant. - I'm a lifelong learner. I'm a community of learners and educators. - I'm gonna send you. You should be on the HISD school board. - That's right. There's a plurality of Dominics that are learning and educating at all times. - Oh my God, that's so true. - So what else is going to. 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. - 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. - Okay. - And so, you know, as we are asking our inner locutor, 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 an 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 exact. 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, ask 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 it a Python or was an Ebola constrictor? They found a live snake. - Some put a snake in the recycling there. - Yeah. 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. - It can't imagine someone's idiot enough to put their live out of them on 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. - Make a new film called Snakes in the Bin. - Snakes in the Bin, wedding dresses in the bin. 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 you know 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 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. - So they sell. - I'll just say let me just jump in. The one thing I worry about is that these rumors like her own, they just send it all to the lab. - No, 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. - So is this all some kind of pro-capitalist rant that we're getting into here? Is that where you're going? - No, no I meant that ironically. I had scare quotes around the whole phrase. - Okay, scare. - Imagine you're scare quotes listening. - No, it's like you know if you they're not throwing your cardboard into the landfill because they want to sell your cardboard in a reprocess form because that's how they make their money. - Yeah. - And that's fair. So it's like it you know it's just there's 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 netches and all kinds of industrial uses. Glass can be remade into industrial forms. The paper gets pulped, the cardboard gets pulped and remade into things. Now I guess the other very interesting thing that I heard is that yeah this was nationally 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 just the quality of the metal it's 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. - I like that. - So that's a comparison to say glass where post consumer use it has to go to like some industrial use. - Right. I don't think she told us the life cycle of glass but is more like two or three turns of you know living in some material form and then before it has to become landfill. - Right. - 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 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, your doubting family members and here I'm thinking of your dad again. Don't deny it. - Oh he said he's a terrible environmental subject. - 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 all 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. - There you go. That's a good message. I like that and also I always think that you know although I love glass in 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 around. - That was a big point to me. - Part of the life cycle energy of the substance I think. Even though aluminum is really bad the first time you make it requires a lot of energy to smelt it once it's there. - All the more reason to recycle it. - Right exactly. So some good thoughts there so many I thank you. That is actually a PSA public service announcement on this week's podcast and I'm gonna immediately after editing and putting out this podcast I'm gonna go right to my dad a heartfelt note about why he should not just you know it 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 doubts the recycling industry because he does doubt the recycling because he said that he said that to your mom like I you know I think they just throw it all in the landfill. - I convene. - 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. - You know I'm gonna bet recycles her materials in a very diligent and probably creative fashion or so the beam. - I bet so. - But she would never throw a life snake in there or a wedding dress. - No unless it was part of a project in our project. - Okay. - 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 help my snake anymore. Maybe some other family will get it if I put it in the recycling bin. I hope that's what happened. - Well and because there's a lot of human labor before it goes through all these systems. - And snake labor. - 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. - I hope that snake found a good home. If that snake hasn't found a good home I would recycle it by bringing it to our home. - I told you. - Recycled companion species on the trail. - I probably rinsed it off but then sure. Well it's been with a bunch of nasty old milk and. - Poor snake. - Diet Coke and stuff. - I feel kind of bad for that snake. - Old pieces of newspaper. - But it's a survivor. - Yeah. All right. On now note we should say go Ursula. Hello listeners, cultures of energy listeners. We are here with the wonderful and brilliant Ursula Vemon. It's good to have you on the line Ursula. - Thank you for having me. - Ursula is a multimedia video essayist and visual artist 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. - We sure are. Ursula I think your work is probably well known to many of us in the energy humanities. You were a distinguished guest I believe at the very first petro culture's 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? I was actually mostly visual geographer almost at that time as an artist and I was I was co-creating an artistic research project with two others basically about trans cultural geographies it was a 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 re position itself towards these huge post socialist territories that opened had opened up and I was getting more more interested in in the Caucasus because they created this they had this huge plan to create an infrastructure including highways pipelines fiberglass networks that would reconnect 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 well it's a fascinating project and an incredibly moving film because you you you follow 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 very well during the course of the ethnography because there was that 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 yeah 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 and it creates these incredibly moving but also kind of uncomfortable moments I felt as I watch 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 Azerbaijanis 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 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 an experience in the field is really happening at the editing table that's really interesting that you 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 yeah well I gave it a more important place let's say because I was started to understand that the lies that I was told by the pims was also the kind of lies that he tells the 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 much more powerful way now did you approach the field work process for black sea 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 trying to remember I had already done a number of field works that had to do with sex work in trans in 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 like sea file was a major territorial research in a much more conscious way than than I did before possibly and 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 in things and events we ask upwards 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 turn to materialism I think I started to change also my how can I say my discursive my structural ideas behind the videos meaning there were a lot less less geographical in in its structure in its structural understanding of the world than ecological Ursula 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 in set 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 interpreted I'm thinking of it for us 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 of multi-dimensional mirrors occurring on screen yes black sea files are true is is already a two channel video project a synchronized two 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 far as law on which is the one on the Ecuadorian Amazon we shot I mean because I went with another artist or architect Paolo Tabares we had the opportunity to take two identical cameras with us and then shoot from angles the interviews and many other things as well so in in the exhibitions 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 the figures that stick in the film and of course that has also to do with perspectivism and it relates to Latin American theory in a way. - Yeah, that's really interesting. In fact, hearing it, how it would be laid out in the exhibition space is really helpful because it's interesting on the screen, you know, sort of watching it on a computer screen but I can see the powerful effect of being in that space and creating that spatiality between these different figures as their interactions are unfolding in the forest and they're speaking and sharing information. - The forest laws are 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 among Sarayaku on the Sarayaku 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 plumper oil if I have that right. And it's really interesting how we see this unfolding story of the arguments that Sarayaku people are able to make to the court itself about the classification of explosives. So in one classification of explosives and they're danger to humans nearby, the A classification of the most dangerous are those that are very, very approximate to human beings. And the B classification would be an explosive that's sort of in a building and slightly remote from people and C would be a set of explosives that are very far away and therefore less threatening. And the way that the court originally or the corporation originally argued it was that these explosives were far away from Sarayaku habitation and therefore less dangerous and therefore permissible and yet they end up, Sarayaku 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 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 the earth is a sentient living organism and that they're a territory that spaces the natural spaces where they live are really fundamental in a way that can't be monetized in the way that a corporate a state sort of model would be. So all of that is to say, again, it's a kind of ethnographic and documentary film and I'm wondering how you came across the case whether it emerged or unfolded during the time you were there, if there were other dramatic events that you were calling making this film and putting it together. - Well, you're addressing a lot of different issues here all at the same time and they can all be connected to Sarayaku as this really emblematic, to a critical case. We actually, it's very complicated to contact indigenous people from afar. That's one of the reasons we weren't 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 we arrived. And so we thought first this might be a real problem because they might have a lot of other, you know, 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 how to do the Shuarq territory to attend the press conference. They were lawyers from Kito coming and there were two people from Sarayaku 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 Sarayaku. I don't think without this dramatic event 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 a film possible or not. It's field work is like that. So I think that's it. 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 beforehand and that's how I see my role as a filmmaker really as part of this world making process. The explosive story in Sarayaku 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 deranges the wildlife and it's a huge impact on the life there in the forest. Yeah, I think this is the explosive 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 the case that the Sarayaku are making that we hear about it to be getting of the film is whether the earth or this particular biotic forest space is a corporate estate, 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 with other guests about the kind of 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 kind of literally on the body of Sarayaku people is another interesting kind of twist on the personhood legal argument. It seems to me and so it's really fascinating. - Well, it has to do with the total interconnection between their understanding of self and the territory as a living entity. That is an exact opposition to the whole private property scheme that our whole legal system is based on. And I think that is where this film kind of connects the problem between private property and the consequences it has eventually for the climate when we continue to destroy these places. You know? - Yeah, really well put. That's actually a nice segue too 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, but 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 forest as not just living organisms, but as future organisms and future spaces. - Yes, I mean, that this is my voice and it's my video essayist voice which always comes in as this moment of authorial voice. It is a sequence taken from Eduardo Cohn's "How Forth Think". Because interestingly, his book and his research is about a valley that is just about two valleys away from Sarayaku where we were doing the research. So our cases were very connected in a way. And we found his book upon our return from Ecuador and reading it, I was really fascinated by his way of connecting to see, let's say to his 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 so it's a very future oriented drive. And that's how I wanted to include it also in this narrative on the forest, as a living entity, not only 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. That's great. We had Eduardo on the podcast. I was going to say happy coincidence. We just had Eduardo on the podcast. And so he's freshen our memories. And especially one thing that he observed was that he connected the preponderance of abstract symbolic and Western civilization to its kind of Anthropocene trajectory and its general sense of treating nature 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 in 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 conian, per se, and 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 all seem to do, at least the ones I've had the opportunity to watch, is they seem to connect places, times and spaces to one another, whether through a kind of narrative 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. I'm sorry at the time I'm confusing deep weather rather, deep weather 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 a new mention before, but do you see part of your filmmaking as trying to connect places to one another so that we can help to visualize and understand these interconnections? 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 on earth could I go to start visualizing and really understanding how this works kind of on the ground? And, you know, in forest law, obviously we discuss with BALO, 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 Michel Seltz, the natural contract, for instance. So this is how we start, not so much like a documentary film where you say, oh, there are terrible things happening somewhere, let's go and document that. It's always a kind of a philosophical project. But in that project, you do want to resist this kind of symbolic overture, to abstract something from its context. It seems to me that the films are very in indexical in that way, right? They like to follow relations. And then they do the opposite of abstracting. They bring back the micropolitics on the ground into larger philosophical thought. This is the project. Although, at the 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. But 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 curator, Ansel Franke 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, you know what? And so, I was a bit tapping into dark what I could make of this. Today, of course, it would be a very different story because we have something like cultural cultures. And a huge body of theory and artistic practices that you could look at, you know? Yeah, I wanted to kind of say, 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 Pindakis. I think that's how you pronounce this, sir. And I might never set it out loud. I know him, but you had a conversation with Andrew Pindakis, 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 medium 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 we might think about corporate substances. I mean, oil may 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 know it when we see it? I really don't know. I mean, Andrew made this interview for, I mean, he was a professor, I think, a professor in the economics department of Singapore. So he focused on this. It's true that I'm not, it's not exactly my specialty either. But he seemed to me from 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. And is that it becomes, it's just, you know, it's predestined to become a market to become a commodity. And hence it is a corporate liquid. So you don't need to bottle it and put a label on it to make it corporate, I guess. I mean, this is what we try 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 on earth are just turned into resources for humans. And that we start to, we have to start to look into act for materiality themselves more and see how they can be activated. And so actually 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 in far as law, one of the people in Sarayaku is speaking in the video when he's lashing the palm tree there 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. And we're typically fine here in the forest, we have all we need. Right. Yeah, there's a great scene with a healer or an expert in medicinal plants. I'm not exactly sure how he would identify himself where 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 so on the lines of like, you know, this is my pharmacy and I know how all of these, you know, the kind of the chemical reactions 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. He's a shaman, he's practicing ancestral medicine, but he's also he has also a doctor in medicine from a university as well. well, so he's both. Yeah. And these plants are actually part of his garden. So his garden looks like the rainforest, but these plants are purposely planted there for his use. And so he made some kind of performance, but then we asked him to 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 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 ecologies with which they have co-evolved. They belong to this forest ecology. 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. And it really works particularly well. I think those scenes in the bi-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. Yes, the camera installed on top of the above the table shooting wound 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. Yeah, no, it's very powerful. I wanted to go back to I think another theme that I've seen in your work. And you mentioned the word infrastructure. And we could begin-- we could work without word, I think. 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 in the case of Ecuador, as you're following the path of these substances, oil or the kind of infrastructures that channel, for example, how do you decide where to stop following and to kind of cut the frame? Let me put that in more clear terms. How do you decide 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 to the courtrooms in Ecuador, right, in Keto, and back to the sacred place in Sarriaku. So how do you decide to scale the works in terms as you're developing each piece? 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 table 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 cosmobition of these indigenous people to make sure the justices in court actually understand what's important for the ruling. And the other small video is about, is an explanation of what Anthropocene is. And then what is it, a video recording of the opening that Michel Serre's kind of book launch and television he explains his book, "Mathal Contract." So these are kind of very important background information and documents that we provide alongside the two videos. The installation comprises all these plus we made a book with a lot of text by Paolo and interviews and so on, which also circulates a great deal among indigenous populations. So I think the project has various dimensions and various places of action. I'm still also thinking so Michel Serre did a book launch on French television. Yeah, that's kind of a myth. France is a whole different world than the United States. Yes, seems increasingly that way. There's a TV program on French television that was called "Appustroph." Even when I was living in the French part of Switzerland for many years, I watched it regularly. And one of them was Michel Serre's natural contract. So I glossed over stumbled over your also brilliant film, "Deep Weather." It's a shorter film, but a very powerful one that explores the hydrogiographies of sea level rise and especially the impacts in Bangladesh, which is 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? 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. 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, and actually they helped fixing the dams in summertime or actually built them even by hand. And I was at 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 into Delta, 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 I thought was worth using. But that in itself wasn't a video project yet. It was just a scene. And when Imra Seiman invited me to come to Alberta to present Black Sea Files and he said, "We will take you to the Tarsans." - Oh wow. - They will now, I haven't brought you. - Yeah, yeah. - So it actually came the other way around that put the Tarsans in the beginning, even though I filmed it two years later. - Well, it's very powerful and it gives you a real sense for the vast amount of human labor that's being expended to try to hold back the seas. And whether that's the physical labor of sandbagging or let's say the labor of technocrats and the Netherlands. I mean, there's a immense amount of labor that's being put into that. And so much less so it seems to me sometimes in the transition away from fossil fuels. So it's a striking juxtaposition to me. So 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. If not projects and just themes, what we might be looking for from you in the years to come. - 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 Columbia to do a new video project in the south of Columbia 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 for us law, 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 than what is done elsewhere. So. - Wow, yeah, this is amazing. We have to tell us a little bit more about what is, what would that look like in terms of its form? - Well, I'm working with the architecture department here at the ATA, 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 a couple of generations there, there's a bit of a discontinuity of the indigenous knowledge that has been handed down by generations. So we're trying to bridge that gap by going a lot of ethnographies and creating these materials again that could be the basis for teaching. - Wow. - So in a way, it's a continuation of a project called Forest Law, just goes one step furthermore into materialization and to actually institutionalize these ideas and see how we can tackle them in the real, it's not so easy. So we'll be working with some ecologists and environmental scientists, and then also with the elders, with the younger generation. It will be a very involved project. really for many years to come. It's an amazing project. Does it have a title at the moment? No, we just call it the Indigenous University because we are still kind of defining whether it should be just with one people or it should we 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 is the same kind of echo region as the one we described in Forest Law which is the connection between the Amazon lowland 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. 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 petriculture and its and its impacts and maybe what's crucial in this moment is to create alternatives. Yeah I think that 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 solidarity a kind of a different a different spirit really than the critical one which is maybe still important and necessary but it doesn't really need it doesn't really need a lead when immediately better future you know so I'd prefer to work on on creating an alternative. Yeah 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 so. And I think artists should be running the world now anyway. I think our good our good friend Jon Gunnar 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 help to create a new university than a technocrat. Yeah 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 actually quite well equipped to maybe bring these different ways together these different ways of thinking and doing that are not bound so much to the disciplinary format so I think that you know why not well we've tried we've tried letting the corporations run the world and we see where that's gotten us so so let's know that this century will be the artist running the world oh so thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us thank you so much for your wonderful questions yeah it's been a great joy and we hope to keep the conversation going in the years to come great thank you