The Image of the Oil Territory
Rania Ghosn (Design Earth)
“We have an even bigger horizon ahead of us,”
publicized the major Brazilian oil company
Petrobras on its website after the 2007 discovery of mega-fields in the South Atlantic of
Brazil. Located at some 200 km off the coast
of Rio de Janiero and at depths nearing 7,000
meters, such large oil fields promised a new
petroleum horizon for the Brazilian economy.
The accompanying Petrobras animation celebrating the new oil province interwove the
geological and technological visualization
of such discoveries, interlacing the internal
architecture of the earth with the technological occupation of the sea in the image
of the offshore oil platform. Such animation
dropped out of representation the broader
geographies of the oil system, including the
gridded, concessionary field of oil blocks, and
the myriad mainland political structures that
regulate the offshore proprietary regime.
T he Mythology of Offshore Oil
The offshore oil industry is often represented
as a series of isolated platforms, overshadowing the legal and physical territories of
the oil system. The rig has singularly preoccupied our imaginaries, both as an icon
of technological progress and as a site of
post-operational ecological reclamations,
punctured throughout by the occasional,
albeit obsessive, media-events of operational
failures. In modern architectural visions, the
technological icon of the power industry is
an inspiration to megastructure projects: a
super-structure, articulated with helipads
and cranes, set against the sublime surface of
the open sea.1 Whilst the offshore oil industry
in the North Sea was developing, the megastructure, as envisioned in projects such as
Constant Nieuwenhuis’ New Babylon, championed ideas of adaptability, flexibility, and
plugging-in. In contemporary ecological proposals, the decommissioned rig is appropriated as a model for a post-resource habitation
of the sea, whereby abandoned structures
across the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea, and
the Campos Basin are converted into artificial
reefs.2 In such worldviews, the image of the
fantastically insular rig severs the underpinning network of power and infrastructure. It
occludes from representation the geographic
scale of the industry and its embeddedness
in mainland political structures that perpetuate the imaginary of an “out-there” domain
of resource extraction beyond environmental and economic accountability. Only succinctly, in the event of an oil-spill, does the
offshore come to occupy public imaginaries.
In Brazil, the 2001 sinking of Petrobras-36
was the most publicized offshore visual yet,
owing in part to spectacular aerial photography of the event. The images of both the
exceptional megastructure and of the envi1 Francois Béguin, “Offshore Oil: The Sixth Continent,” 2A: Architecture
and Energy (2001): 122-127.
2 See for example, Geoff Manaugh, “Plug-in Ecozones,” in New Geographies #2: Landscapes of Energy, Rania Ghosn ed. (Cambridge: Harvard
GSD, 2010), 111–118.
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ronmental “accident” are thus part of the oil
valuation regime. The techniques of visual
imaging, or the “technologies of the visible,” as Peter Galison and Caroline Jones
advance, are the means by which the event
of the disaster becomes manifest. Reflecting
on the “spillcam” coverage of the 2010
Deepwater Horizon spill disaster, Galison
and Jones argue that the iconic and unprecedented visual images of the oil spill offered
a continuing announcement of our ability to
picture but not stop the flow, soliciting the
pragmatic necessity of thinking beyond the
surface of images.3 Through the three representational lenses–the technological, ecological, and environmentalist–the oil rig comes to
exist as a fantastically insular technological
object that severs ties with the political rationality of infrastructure. It abstracts the systemic imperative of infrastructure by making
visible only some moments, while constantly
abstracting waste and destruction.
The reclamation of the offshore in political
consciousness thus requires one to address
the visual abstraction of the offshore on the
same grounds: that of the aesthetics of territory. In his call for a “science of the imaginary,” Reinhold Martin presents two particularly urgent tasks of the aesthetic and
the territorial: the first, which “makes the
invisible visible,” the second which “breaks
open the enclosure and enclaves that dispose
these outside or inside of both political and
cultural representation.”4The architectural
project in this worldview is political in as
far as it engages in a quarrel on perceptible
spatial givens, calling into question nothing less than the territorial organization of
our world. To quote Jacques Rancière, it is
a dispute about the division of what is perceptible to the senses.5 It looks precisely into
where “there is nothing to see” to differently
3 Peter Galison and Caroline Jones, “Unknown Quantities,” Artforum XLIX
(2010): 49-51.
4 Reinhold Martin, “Moment of Truth,” Log 7 (Winter/Spring 2006): 15–
20.
5 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004).
represent common territory. This project is
fundamentally political from the moment
that it disturbs the abstraction of space and
brings spaces that were previously discarded
and treated as insignificant matters of fact
into focus as matters of concern.
Offshore Territories
The territorialization of the rig counters a
managerial, infrastructural ethics of negative
externalities. Rather than an isolated architectural structure or ecological event, the rig
is more appropriately conceived as a node
within the network of offshore petroleum.
Seen from this perspective, it is a synecdoche of the concession block as the territorial
unit of oil extraction. The internalization of
the offshore into circuits of economic value
requires the division of the sea along a rigid
grid into concession blocks through which the
State grants the oil company the legal right
to explore and develop these resources. The
concession is hence a rendering of space as a
political, legal, and economic category: it is
owned, distributed, mapped, calculated, and
controlled. The concessionary territory, as an
object of surveys, maps, and a myriad of representations, is central to and necessary for
nature’s renewed legibility and its material
appropriation. Indeed, the geologic discovery had prompted the Brazilian government
to revise the country’s petroleum laws and
licensing in strategic areas, putting forward a
suite of proposals that further advanced the
power of the State in the field’s acreage and
operatorship. Highlighting the interrelation
of representations and political power, the
geographer Bruce Braun examines how the
geological survey of Canada in 1878 was not
only necessary for nature’s material transformation in circuits of capital but also “brought
the state directly into contact with its territory–and more precisely with the qualities of
this territory.”6 Historically, the management
6 Bruce Braun, “Producing Vertical Territory: geology and governmentality
in late Victorian Canada,” Cultural Geographies 7 (2000): 7–46, 12.
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of socio–ecological relations has been mediated and enabled through the consolidation
of power over space. Throughout the twentieth century, the concessionary oil system
has been centered on access to large swaths
of land, which is granted by a central political
authority. As the locational logic of resources
is geologic rather than geographic, extractive
industries often operated in areas isolated
from the power of central authority, as well
as those areas previously unconnected to
networks of communication, transport, and
labor. The expansion of concessionary capital into “extractive-frontiers” produced an
extensive geographic and geologic body of
information. Furthermore, the concessionary large technical system of roads, company
towns, and security posts “developed” the
hinterland and reinforced political authority, social integration, and military security
in such peripheral areas. Whether the Ford
rubber concession in the Amazon Valley, the
United Fruit Company’s plantations in various Central American countries, or petroleum
leases across the Arab World, the production
of raw materials required the provision of
transport infrastructures and the deployment
of a security apparatus to protect the undertaking in remote locations. The subsequent
economic development of these territories
required an expansive technological network
of geological maps, transportation vectors,
drilling axes, refinery ports, and labor nodes,
all of which were necessary to transform the
earth’s matter into circuits of capital.
T he Image of the Territory
Why does it matter whether geographies
are imagined represented or not? In a piece
entitled Where are the missing spaces, I argue
that when geography is made not to matter,
the urban is confined to the morphological or
administrative boundaries of a city in a representational lineage of Manhanattism.7 Such
“designed” abstractions are powerful tools
to contain, essentialize, and hence depoliticize the territory in the planning for energy
7 Rania Ghosn, “Where Are the Missing Spaces,” Perspecta 45 (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2012): 109–116.
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regimes. The confinement of the urban process to the “city” does three things: 1] it
abstracts the materialities of urban systems–
its dimensions’ attributes; 2] it leaves out
the associated geographic transformations of
deployment of such environmental technologies; 3] it does not attend to the politics of
consensus or dissensus on how to organize
and distribute resources. So when geography is reduced to a thin line, the territory is
detached from the technological, geographic,
and political attributes of infrastructure.
Indeed, the mandate for “clean” urbanism,
I argue, rests on the city’s capacity to divest
itself of the environmental costs of urbanization while reaching out for its resources
to political and geographic entities beyond
city jurisdictions, what is referred to as an
“externality field.” The sites and forms of such
hinterlands are an out-of-sight-out-of-mind
entity for the public as well as for architects,
leaving out how energy (and particularly fossil fuels) shapes geographies.
If urbanism has served to abstract the social
and spatial relations of urban infrastructures,
could the territory–as a paradigm, representational practice, and aesthetic project–allow
to expand the scale of the urban to account
for the Earth, and bring it into the domain
of public and disciplinary controversies? Our
practice, Design Earth, is concerned with
such relationships between territory and
design. It engages the geographies of technical systems to open up aesthetic and political concerns for architecture and urbanism.
Literally, ‘earth-writing’ from the Greek geo(earth) and -graphia (writing), the practice
of making geographies involves the coupled undertakings of “writing about”–projecting or representing the earth–and also
“writing”–marking, forming, or presenting
again a world. It responds to a condition in
which designers are increasingly compelled
to tackle concerns, such as energy, that had
been confined to the domains of engineering,
ecology, or regional planning. Such issues
of infrastructure, technology, and policy
now invite articulation through design and
require a re-examination of tools to formalize
their attributes. It is simultaneously a representational and speculative practice, which
by making visible and formal, counters technocratic abstractions of space.8
4.7 km: A Geographic Stroll around
the Horizon
How can we speak through architecture to
a representational project of political ecology
that challenges the aesthetics of totalizing
abstractions, scientific datascapes, and crippling guilt? The project 4.7 km, A Geographic
Stroll around the Horizon counters the territorial abstraction of the offshore to reclaim
it within the political consciousness of the
urban. By deploying the geographic aesthetic
construct of the horizon, the project expands
the spatial and cognitive imaginary of the
city of Rio de Janeiro into its ocean-hinterland. In The Image of the City (1960), Kevin
Lynch emphasized the relations of mobility, perception, and legibility for the spatial reorientation of people in the alienated
space of the city as well as within the urban
totality.9 The project extends Lynch’s framework to the scale of the geographic by projecting a constellation of Rio’s most iconic
sites between the coast and the oil offshore.
Such monuments stand for Rio, functioning synecdochally to figure the city in the
extractive urban hinterland. The Estádio
do Maracanã, Pão de Açúcar, Aqueduto da
Carioca and Favela-Bairro, Sambadrome, and
the Corcovado are extracted from the city
and projected into a linear archipelago. The
distances between each island and the following one are set so as to extend the limit of
the perceivable. The distance between these
islands is defined in relation to the optics of
vision associated with the horizon. Set at a
distance of 4.7 kilometers for an observer
standing on the Earth’s surface, the horizon
is a historically significant construct: it represents the maximum range of perception,
communication, and knowledge. The last
island is the oil Petrobras platform. Around
8 Rania Ghosn, ed. New Geographies 2: Landscapes of Energy (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2010).
9 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960).
sunset, at the moment when the neon-pink
sun slips below the horizon, everyone stops,
stands and claps: a nightly salute to city, sea,
and sky. Such Aristotelians celebrate that
philosophy begins in wonder, and that to
wander beyond the horizon–the urge to know
beyond the conceivable–is itself the engine of
the polis and civic life.
Beyond a mere shift in scale, being in the
ocean recuperates a geographic aesthetic
away from the prevailing managerial pragmatism of mapping logistics. In The Horizon:
A History of Our Infinite Longing, Didier
Maleuvre explores our fascination with the
horizon through a sweeping history of cultural artifacts that “draw the line between
the known and the unknowable.”10 Drawing
on Weltlandschaft, the 16th century Dutch
tradition of the “world landscape,” this project
employs a bird’s eye view with a high horizon line as though the viewer were peering
out over the landscape from above. Against
a background defined by the curvature of
the earth, the assemblage of geographic
objects features the carnival parade in the
foreground, filled with revelers, floats, and
adornments from numerous samba schools.
The project draws as well on Victor Pimstein’s
HORIZON 35 series (2008), which investigates the position of the line where water
and sky meet, as well as the variations in
blueness of each. In a series of portrait shots,
the ten proposed geographic silhouettes are
figured against a high horizon and changing
skies. The reclaimed geographic constellation
solicits new subjectivities and experiences
around the blue horizon. “The sea gives us
the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and
infinite,” observes Ben-Artzi in relation to
the Mediterranean, “and in feeling his own
infinite in that Infinite, man is stimulated
and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited.”11 The newly inhabited sea territory forms
a wandering surface for the collective.
10 Didier Maleuvre, The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing (University of California Press, 2011,: 1.
11 Yosse Ben-Artzi, “The Idea of a Mediterranean Region in Nineteenth- to
Mid-Twentieth-Century German Geography,” Mediterranean Historical
Review (2004): 2–15, 6.
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A Geographic Stroll Around the Horizon, Rio City Vision Competition, 2013, Honorable Mention
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A Geographic
G
Aesthetics
Where can designers stand vis-à-vis the
question of representation, economics, and
the environment? And what is the agency
of design, beyond positivist calculations and
ecological iconography, in shaping technological systems? Ecology is tightly tangled
up with the capitalist imaginary of the Earth.
Dating back to the nineteenth-century conception of an “economy of nature,” the etymology of the term “ecology,” in Greek oikos
meaning house or home, is also the root of
economy, with the two terms translating as
the study and the management of the household.12 To live in an epoch that is shaped by
extensive environmental activities is to be
confronted with a home at the scale of the
Earth. In Homo Geographicus, Robert Sack13
notes that “we humans are geographical
beings transforming the earth and making
it into a home, and that transformed world
affects who we are.” He adds that the consequences of our geographical agency are more
pressing because we are now “geographical
leviathans.” Forms of economy, politics, and
environments are thus constructed through
our technological relations with the materials
of the Earth, or what we refer to as “resources”
and “wastes.” Such geographies remain, however, often invisible from the viewpoint of
urban centers. And as I have argued, such
erasure of geography is a “designed” misrepresentation that externalizes the costs of the
urban process and conceals disagreements on
how to organize the world and its resources.
If the enclave abstracts the systemic imperative of infrastructure by making visible only
some moments while constantly abstracting
systemic costs and benefits, then countering
the enclave allows us to unfold the “thick
space” of the system. The territorial narrative of offshore oil rescales representation,
and hence aesthetic intervention and political
agency. It renders visible the triad of space,
representation, and power in the construction of petroleum territorialities. From this
12 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
13 Robert Sack, Homo Geographicus (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1997).
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perspective, offshore oil is achieved via a
reinforcement of territorialities, which is a
constitutive dimension and stake of contestation. Such is an invitation to inquire into
how our energy relations are organized and
reproduced through infrastructures.
This observation on the geographies of fossil fuels is all so significant at a time when
the triad of energy, economy, and environment is at the forefront of design concerns.
It is important to avoid those proposals for
“Green,” or “Clean” urbanism, as they purge
(once again) the dirty matters of geography.
Some design projects that have responded
to the “green imaginary” have proposed to
reconcile the imperatives of the economy
and ecology. Such visions, however, contain
political disagreement on how to organize
the world and its resources: they do not put
into question the socio-spatial contradictions
inherent to the production of all environments, let alone aspire to transform them.
Ultimately, by reproducing technological
fixes, such projects are likely to yield similarly
(uneven) future worlds. In this worldview,
Homo Geographicus is Homo Economicus. If
the transition to a renewable energy regime is
not accompanied by a reflection on the geographies upon which the current regime rests,
and by an inquiry into its own proposed
geographiesbe it wind or solar– then these
proposed projects may usher in little if any
political and economic transformation, and
merely pay lip service to an ecological discourse within urbanism. The debate over the
(next) mode of energy requires thus a geographic examination, to foresee and possibly
avoid the potential perpetuation of uneven
geographies of power in the sunbelts, fields,
and wind corridors of the world.
Can the political arts, which include architecture, shift energy from the consensus of
“matters of fact” towards the aesthetics of
“matters of concern” and destabilize a takenfor-granted space of “reality,” “economy,” and
of the “community of common destiny” that
ecology has come to portray? By unfolding
the “thick space” of the system, such is an
invitation to inquire into how our social relations are organized and reproduced through
infrastructures. We propose a geographical
framework through which design can account
for the forms of life, art, and politics that are
constructed through our relations with the
Earth’s matter. This approach reclaims the
production of the space of nature into public controversies to connect political ecology with the energy of collective, aesthetic
experience. If politics is the art of the possible, then the multiplication of the possible
requires a reconnection with the many available formats of the aesthetic. The geographic
aesthetic can become a way of protecting
from the pathology of negative externalities: it represents relationships, connections,
effects, and diagrammatics of infrastructure.
A geographic sensibility prompts us to think
further about the design in relation to scale,
territory, and more. But above all, it elicits
us to intervene within power and it representations, in ways that make a difference.
The challenge of a geographic ethics is thus
not simply to represent these systems, but to
intervene in them so as to render visible the
inequality between the distribution of spaces
and time, as well as the distribution of capacities and power.
Project Credits:
Design Earth Team: Rania Ghosn + El Hadi Jazairy, with Jia Weng, Dorin Baul,
Justin Garrison, Carla Landa.
Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy are partners of Design
Earth . The practice engages the geographies of technoological systems to open up a range of aesthetic and politiitical concerns for architecture and urbanism. Design Earth’s
work has been recognized with several awards, including the
2016 Architectural League of New York for Young Architects
and the 2015 Jacques Rougerie Foundation’s First Prize
for “Neck of the Moon.” Ghosn and Jazairy hold doctor of
design degrees from Harvard University Graduate School
of Design, where they were founding editors of the journal
New Geographies. They are authors of the recently published
Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015), for which they received
the 2014 ACSA Faculty Design Award.
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Rania Ghosn