Carlos Cruz-Diez, Chromatic Environment. Simón Bolívar (Guri) Hydroelectric Dam, Venezuela.
We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom
My book manuscript explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental shifts of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. It examines the cultural politics and aesthetic forms that supported and responded to the state’s modernization programs, positing culture as both a record and an agent of ecological change. Following this argumentative thread, the chapters analyze imaginaries of petroleum in 1960s avant-garde poetry, abstract artworks made for energy infrastructure projects, photobooks about the changing urban landscapes of the 1970s, films that critiqued the oil-fueled consumerist boom linking Venezuela and Miami, and novels confronting the social breakdown of the 1989 “Caracazo” through narratives of plagues and natural disasters. Highlighting the twofold nature—at once material and symbolic—of processes of environmental transformation, the book responds to the need to rethink culture and aesthetics as inseparable from the power of humans to remake the earth.