Black Sea Files: transnational ecologies, counter cartographies, and diffuse agency in Ursula Biemann’s video essay

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes Ursula Biemann’s video essay Black Sea Files as an experiment in training the viewer to perceive large-scale, transnational networks of capital, human displacement, and ecological destruction. Reacting against the norms of Western media, Biemann constructs a regime of pity that motivates the viewer to act on the suffering of distant others by shifting the mode of presentation between the local and the global, exposing and interrogating Western space-time mediations of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline project, and figuring agency within the project as diffuse. These mediation techniques train the viewer to engage more deeply with the content being presented, expose transnational networks of agency and responsibility within human displacement and ecological destruction, and render visible new participatory positions within those systems that offer more potential for meaningful action and resistance. The subject of a transnational oil pipeline proves fertile ground for the interrogation of the transnational networks that impact the planet and its various ecologies, and the video essay proves a powerful tool in rendering those networks visible.

KEYWORDS:

• Ursula Biemann
• oil
• transnational networks
• distributed agency
• human displacement
• Black Sea Files

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Professor Sandra Ponzanesi for her invaluable contributions to this paper.

Data availability statement

All images are screenshots taken from the open-access website World of Matter: http://www.worldofmatter.net/black-sea-files-0#path=black-sea-files-

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abby Schroering

Abby Schroering is a graduate student at Columbia University in the City of New York in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, PhD Program in Theatre.