Oil and Water Don't Mix
The following quote comes from an interview by Andrew Pendakis with the artist, Ursula Biemann who is contributing to the Maldives Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Both articulate the profound culture-shifting and potentially world-shattering impacts of two basic fluids: oil and water. I hope you will read it. The text brims with consciousness and conscienciousness.
"Oil and water, though not quite opposites, are anecdotally understood as chemically incompatible (‘they don’t mix’). This incompatibility mirrors a very strong associative or symbolic antagonism.
Oil is arguably the dirtiest of liquids, ‘the devil’s excrement’, not just on the level of its (highly racialized) material properties (its blackness, its stickiness, its opacity, etc.), but on the terrain of its social and political usage. Sociologists have long noted the ways in which reserves of oil have a way of evolving into inflexible or brutal state structures (layers of corrupt officials and bureaucracy) even as they engender uniquely consumerist life-worlds, populations habituated to expect an inexhaustible and ‘labourless’ flow of automobiles, luxury goods, etc. Water seems to come from an utterly opposed moral universe. Linked to ablution, sustenance, openness, transparency, purity, etc water is the liquid of transcendence, but also the most modest and common of social goods. This opposition has been dramatically compromised by the increasing commodification of water and the emergence of huge conglomerated interests in the profits available to those who own and market it.”