3.4.26 Santiago Acosta

“We Are Like Oil: Culture, Nature, and Modernity in Venezuela”

4-530 EST, in English

While the 1970s are remembered as a decade of energy crisis, in Venezuela they were a period of extraordinary abundance that redefined the nation’s economy, culture, and relation to the environment. Oil became at once a blessing and a curse, driving rapid modernization and artistic flourishing while paving the way for the crises of the 1980s. This talk examines how culture became a crucial site for articulating the meanings, contradictions, and lasting effects of oil modernity, tracing how art, literature, and visual media responded to, and often helped organize, the era’s vast social and ecological transformations. First, it shows how oil-funded cultural institutions positioned culture as a public resource in the service of capitalist modernization. Second, it examines neo-avant-garde artistic practices that advanced early critiques of extraction and the commodification of nature. Finally, it analyzes kinetic art produced for energy infrastructure projects, where abstraction intersected with state-led environmental transformation. Rather than seeking direct representations of petroleum in literature or visual artworks, the talk attends to the indirect ways oil reorganized relations between culture, nature, and state power during the oil boom and its aftermath.

Santiago Acosta (Yale University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. His book manuscript, We Are Like Oil: Culture, Nature, and Modernity in Venezuela, explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental transformations of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. Acosta is also an award-winning poet. His fourth and most recent collection El próximo desierto, earned him the José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “Ciudad y Naturaleza,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) and the Museum of Environmental Sciences of the University of Guadalajara. In 2024, Spain’s Visor Libros released a collection of his selected poetry, La desesperanza.