Carlos Cruz-Diez, Chromatic Environment. Simón Bolívar (Guri) Hydroelectric Dam, Venezuela.
We Are Like Oil: Culture, Nature, and Modernity in Venezuela
My book manuscript examines how art, literature, and visual media helped produce the social and ecological transformations of Venezuela’s 1970s oil boom. Moving across avant-garde poetry, kinetic art, urban photography, documentary film, and contemporary fiction, it argues that cultural production was constitutive of oil modernity rather than simply a record of it. The chapters follow the arc from boom to bust: from the rise of the oil-funded cultural apparatus in the 1960s, through the infrastructure megaprojects, rapid urbanization, and mass consumer culture of the 1970s, to the breakdown of the oil-based social order in the late 1980s. The book situates Venezuelan cultural production within the global history of extractive capitalism, repositioning Venezuela as a central case for understanding how petromodernity is built and contested.