Alberta Crude

This project unfolds around Edmonton and Calgary in the oil-producing province of Alberta, Canada. The project seeks to explore themes such as oil production and its representation, settler colonialism and its relationship to (distant) history.

This project unfolds around Edmonton and Calgary in the oil-producing province of Alberta, Canada. The vast majority of Alberta’s oil operations are located in the far north of the province and consists of unconventional oil extracted from oil sands deposits : a type of oil that is found mixed with sand and therefore has to be ‘cleaned’, making its extraction highly polluting. 

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 extractivist world that is in total contradiction with the history of the territory that is now Canada and the indigenous cosmologies that inhabit it.

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 nature world.

NB : all archive images come from the Glenbow Archive in Calgary, Alberta. Some are subjects to copyright, please contact me if publication :)