alberta crude EN

This project is taking place in the province of Alberta, Canada, mainly around the two cities of Edmonton and Calgary. Alberta could be compared to the Canadian Texas, a conservative oil-producing province (Canada has the third largest reserves in the world), consisting mainly of large plains and rolling hills. The vast majority of Alberta’s oil operations are located in the far north of the province around the oil sands deposits, a type of oil that is found mixed with sand and therefore has to be ‘cleaned’, making its extraction highly polluting. The idea behind this project is to follow up on ideas I have developed in previous works around our relationship with nature, the separation between nature and culture, and the resulting exploitation of the landscape. Here, the Canadian landscape and the relationship maintained with it appear as an extreme case of the ambivalence between protecting nature and exploiting it. Gradually, the idea of working around the two cities of Edmonton and Calgary emerged because they represent a system of relationship to the capitalist world and exploitation that is in total contradiction with the history of the territory that is now Canada and the indigenous cosmologies that inhabit it. 

Furthermore, examining the city within the context of the Canadian landscape interests me because it runs counter to the image we have of Canada as an untouched and untouchable nature reserve; questioning these representations seems relevant to me, always in the context of the Western paradigm.

Canada is a colonial state founded on the exploitation of resources (fur trade, mining, timber, oil, gas, uranium, etc.) which, at the same time, served to justify the presence of settlers and still serves today to consolidate the foundations of a cultural pride that is constitutive of Canadian identity. The presence and power of representations related to oil in Alberta culture is striking, and this is part of what lies at the heart of this project. The idea is to trace these different threads (oil, settler colonialism, the relationship to history) to see how they have shaped Canada today and to try to read transparently what this says about our relationship to the world and to nature.