Scenes of Extraction
Attendance is free of charge, but registration is required. Please register by emailing utrechtmemorystudies@uu.nl.
By weaving together archival documents, amateur footage, and newly generated CGI maps, the film transforms these materials into a speculative media archaeology of extractive vision. It parses the history of “Reflection Seismography,” an oil exploration method heavily tested in the region despite its destructive and uncertain nature. By exposing this technical legacy, which remains the backbone of the global energy complex and is still used in fracking and deep-sea mining today, the work reveals the coupling of visual and extractive technologies that shaped imperial landscapes and their enduring ecological aftermath. It further considers how archives operate as instruments of dispossession yet remain vital sites for remediating cultural memory and imagining post-extractive futures.
Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi (online), chaired by Salomé Lopes Coelho (Utrecht University). The event will be concluded with a reception.
In light of the ongoing war by the US and Israel against Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine, we acknowledge the conditions under which this event takes place. Although the program centres on extraction and colonial visual regimes rather than the war directly, we see these histories as inseparable from the geopolitical and ecological crises shaping Iran today.
This screening, co-organised with the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies, is part of the Moving [Images] Post-Extractivism programme, led by Salomé Lopes Coelho within the ERC project Ecologies of Violence and in collaboration with the Network for Environmental Humanities, Utrecht University.
Savanna and the Mountain
Pauwstraat 13a, 3512 TG Utrecht
The screening is organised and facilitated by Salomé Lopes Coelho (Utrecht University) and is followed by a conversation with Aida Fernandes (Chairperson of the Covas do Barroso Communal Lands Council and member of the United in Defense of Covas do Barroso anti-mining association) and Diana Vela Almeida (Utrecht University).
The Film Series, Projecting Post-extractivism, brings together collaborative documentaries and essay films that, through formal and sensorial experimentation, hold cinema accountable for its complicities while affirming it as a territory of inquiry and political-affective resistance to extractive violence. Working with archives, Indigenous worldviews, and situated struggles, these films trace extractivism as a visual and colonial capitalist regime – from green extractivism in Portugal, to early industrial and oil corporate archives in Iran, and to contemporary illegal mining violence in Yanomami territories in Amazonia – enacting, through cinema, worlds and ways of being, feeling, and knowing that colonial modernity has rendered expendable or extractible. Central to the series are cinema's own capacities, in which formal and aesthetic choices are integral to opening post-extractivist world-configurations — rendering extractive violence perceptible while affectively and collectively composing alternatives.
The series unfolds across three sessions of film screenings followed by a conversation:
Session 1 – 16 April, 19.30 | Savanna and the Mountain (Paulo Carneiro, Portugal, 2024, 1h17'). Guests: Aida Fernandes and Diana Vela Almeida. At BAK – Basecamp
Session 2 – 26 May, 17.00 | One Image, Two Acts (Sanaz Sohrabi, Iran, 2020, 45') + Scenes of Extraction (Sanaz Sohrabi, Iran, 2023, 43'). Guest: Filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi (online). At Muntstraat 2A
Session 3 – June | The Falling Sky (Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha & Eryk Rocha, Brazil, 2024, 1h50'). [More details soon]
The film series operates within the Moving [Images] Post-Extractivism year-long programme curated and led by Salomé Lopes Coelho, as part of the ERC project Ecologies of Violence, in collaboration with the Network for Environmental Humanities and the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies at Utrecht University.