Petro-Gothic: Haunting and Desire in the Carbon Age

Oil lubricates our petro-modernity while suffocating the planet. As a substance that fuels carbon capitalism, it is both toxic and intoxicating. But oil is so much more than that. Oil does not merely fuel our cars but is used to build our roads: we drive on asphalt, held together by bitumen, a petroleum-derived binder. We wear oil-derived synthetic textiles and oil-based cosmetics on our skin; we ingest microplastics (which take hundreds of years to break down) through water and food and breathe them in through the air. In many ways, we have ourselves become oil. Oil is the dark material that erodes the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between life and death, between self and other bodies, and between the temporalities of deep geological time and contemporary consumer capitalism. Millions of years sit between the time from when oil was organic matter until it was transformed into rock oil (petroleum). Since the modern petroleum industry began in 1859, global oil consumption has reached an estimated 1.4 to 1.5 trillion barrels, with approximately half consumed since the late 1990s.1 Oil is the ghost that haunts our near and distant future. As with ghosts, the carbon age, then, disrupts linear and progressive conceptions of time. As Andreas Malm contends in relation to the cumulative impact of fossil fuel combustion on the earth’s systems, ‘we inhabit the diachronic, the discordant, the inchoate … [We are] being sucked back by planetary forces into the hole of time, the present dissolving into past and future alike.’2 Freakish weather events caused by Anthropogenic global warming are, as Amitav Ghosh writes, ‘the mysterious work of our hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms.’3 Seductive and monstrous, oil is, truly and quintessentially, Gothic. 

Tricky to pin down, the Gothic is a mode that keeps on giving in times of compounding crises and planetary destruction. Its primary motive is to unsettle boundaries and categories. You will not necessarily find vampires, zombies, or Poe-esque horror here, but perhaps something more nightmarish. Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund, and Johan Höglund describe the Gothic Anthropocene as a modality that ‘dwells on widespread anxieties, dread, the horrific, the repellent, and achieves a frisson that other mimetic modes of representation can barely render.’4 Indeed, how can a realist mode capture the accumulated trauma and disaster of a ‘hyperobject’ like climate breakdown?5 The Gothic, in its many terrifying ways, creates a lexicon and an imaginary for dark times. But it does more. When blended with oil, the Petro-Gothic preys on illicit desires, or as Gothic scholar Sara Wasson puts it, ‘indulges [in] forbidden longings.’6 A prime example of the Petro-Gothic’s transgressive sensual tension is Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani’s sexy-slick but disgusting articulation of oil as ‘hydrocarbon corpse juice’ in Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008).7 The Petro-Gothic’s love affair with ‘dirty’ fossil fuels recalls literary scholar Fred Botting’s observation that in the Gothic, ‘threats are spiced with thrills, terrors with delights, horrors with pleasures’ – an apt assessment of our carbon capitalist addiction to oil.8

Artists from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) who grew up with oil wealth during the oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s are no strangers to the horror-delight paradox of oil. In what follows, I look at three artworks, respectively: the video Crude Eye (2022) by Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri (b.1983), the site-specific installation The Lost Path (2020) by Saudi artist Muhannad Shono (b.1977), and the video The Return of the Old Ones (2020) by Saudi artist Ayman Zedani (b.1984). Each work offers a different and transformative perspective on the Petro-Gothic and, more specifically, the ‘oil encounter’: the alienating and violent moment when the instruments of petro-modernity tear open the landscape in search of oil.9 In these artworks, monstrosity meets dream, promise meets finitude, oil infrastructure meets natural landscape, beauty meets terror, and death-becomes-life-becomes-death. In addition, these works remind us that ‘[t]he Gothic aesthetic is steeped in memory and haunted by a pathological obsession with remembering.’10 Therefore these works can be speculatively read as what once was, as well as what is to come. By drawing on the occultic, supernatural, and embodied aspects of oil, these works operate simultaneously as (untold) histories and as omens of our carbon age.  

Monira Al Qadiri’s Crude Eye is based on a childhood memory of passing an oil refinery when driving across a bridge in Kuwait. She is known for a practice that interrogates the blessings and curses of petro-culture, and that melds the disastrous effects of the oil industry with Kuwait’s pearl diving pre-oil economy. Al Qadiri’s oeuvre comprises sculpture, installation, video, and performance. The video reconstructs Al Qadiri’s own oil encounter as she remembers the vast and estranging infrastructure of the refinery. To a child, it seemed like a gleaming and otherworldly city. Electronic drone tones of a 1980s synthesiser composed by the artist’s sister, musician Fatima Al Qadiri, accompany an ethereal and childlike voice-over, as if it were a ghost from the past. Ironically, the artist flips the massive scale of the refinery into a miniature, as if it were a doll’s house – another uncanny childhood echo. Menacing and magical, her model is made primarily from domestic waste – fashioned from toilet rolls and tin cans.  Urban Gothic narratives are often steeped in trash, which unleash toxic and environmental terrors.11 But Al Qadiri’s crisp and clean furnaces, storage tanks, distillation units, and flare stacks show none of that, aside from the fact that they are all made from waste. Here the primary filth, oil, remains invisibly stored in pipelines and vats. Oil’s ubiquity, but also its invisibility for the average consumer, is a main characteristic of petro-culture.12 But the conspicuous absence of Al Qadiri’s main protagonist, oil, also recalls Mark Fisher’s definition of the eerie as ‘a failure of presence’: ‘there is nothing present when there should be something.’13

The video’s opening sequence oozes Gothic imagery: dark and blood-red tones obscure the refinery before its lights come on. Consider the narrator’s first words too: ‘As a child I had a vision: in the midst of the desert’s hot dusty clouds, the deep darkness rose. A pitch-black night.’  The oil refinery is described as ‘a palace, the great possible city of lights’. Smoke and fog swirl around the refinery’s distillation towers, contributing to the ghostliness of the scene. The whole description of the refinery process reads like a Gothic horror tale: ‘From the tall towers, fiery flashes burnt. Dark spires, glimpses of sluggish smoke whirled along their peaks.’ As the camera slowly pans across the refinery and sensuously zooms in on parts of the installation, the narrator comments: ‘A shiny jewelled eye, it stared back, catching its lover, in a procession of Gothic effect. These bright flowers that charm us so, men die and rot deep out of sight, to keep this jungle flower bright’ (emphasis mine).  Not only do these sentences underline the organic origin of oil, they also mobilise Gothic excess and the tension between the horrors and the delights of oil. Rot, in particular, amplifies the Gothic aesthetic of decay. It is, after all, a condition that moves between life and death. The rust and soot that Al Qadiri has mimicked on the installation units of her miniature model are also a case in point.

In Crude Eye, oil is cast as a cannibalistic revenant that returns to the world in different forms or by-products: ‘Sacrificial benzene, methylene, asphalt, gasoline, tar … Crude, the smeared keeper of life that fed on itself in darkness, refined from oil stone, lay here.’14 Moreover, crude is portrayed as a vampiric entity with an all-consuming bloodthirst: ‘Thirsty after their long black sleep, the gods groaned and shook their heads: “we are dry, we are dry,” they said … The gods descended on the vats, drinking up love cries and memories, lines from movies and songs, and puffs of breath.’ In a carbon economy, oil devours all in its wake. Whereas most of the video focuses on details of the oil refinery’s infrastructure, the closing scene shows the whole refinery surrounded by darkness, itself bathed in an almost celestial light, with its mirror image reflected in a dark pool of water. Mirror images and doubles are a common Gothic trope, but here the mirroring does not serve as opposites.15 Rather, it shows the miracle and curse of oil as a seemingly endless, self-replicating machinery of destruction. The refinery or oil terminal is, as Jeff Diamanti points out, a terminal landscape, a place of transformation but also one of finitude.16 As such, the refinery, and by corollary the carbon economy, is an ouroboros, feeding on itself, which some day too must perish – oil reserves in the GCC are predicted to run out this century.17 It is an apt conclusion on behalf of Al Qadiri, reminding us of how death is twisted into consumerist greed and hyper-capitalism. In true Gothic form, there is no redemption. 

Taking a different approach to the Petro-Gothic aesthetic is Muhannad Shono’s The Lost Path. Whereas in Al Qadiri’s work oil is occulted, in Shono’s it is brought to the surface. The Lost Path was produced as a site-specific installation for the inaugural edition of Desert X AlUla, Saudi Arabia, in 2020. Comprising 65,000 recycled PVC pipes that are bundled together to mimic oil streams, the 300-metre installation spills across the sandy terrain and around rock formations in the AlUla desert. PVC is an oil derivative, and as in so much of Shono’s work, his material, particularly industrial by-products, becomes an estranging rogue agent in relation to the landscape.18 Trained originally as an architect, Shono’s spatial and ecological concerns often result in large-scale interventions that are hauntingly beautiful and evoke renewal, but also inadvertently point to ruin. The Lost Path suggests a refusal of oil to remain buried. Rather than being extracted by violent drilling machinery, here oil manifests as the eerie material of Gothic excess: it belongs but does not belong to this landscape. Following Fisher, ‘there is something present where there should be nothing.’19 Here oil, or rather its PVC-derivative, is a quintessential revenant: it resurfaces and returns to its landscape of origin, where the oil encounter first took place, the desert. In addition, it seems to come very much alive as it snakes its way across the sandy plain. The Lost Path, then, turns the landscape into a liminal site that sits between death (extraction and extinction) and life (a bio-diverse ecosystem). It is a site of haunting and therefore a site of lingering trouble: Saudi Arabia remains the world’s largest exporter of crude.20

Shono’s PVC pipes appear to emerge from a single tentacular presence that either holds the landscape in a chokehold or seeks to liberate it from extractivist incarceration. The installation is not nature but rather undead, a nature-adjacent, alluring yet monstrous and uncategorisable entity. Donna Haraway updates ‘SF writer H. P. Lovecraft’s misogynist racial-nightmare [tentacular] monster Cthulhu (note spelling difference)’ with a wish for a  ‘Chthulucene [that] entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in- assemblages – including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.’21 The Lost Path might at first glance veer towards Haraway’s sensuous inclusivity, but in carbon capitalism the possibility of Lovecraftian horror always lurks around the corner. While The Lost Path entices us with beauty, its subtext suggests dread: that of a planet damaged by anthropogenic action will ultimately fail humans. In this work, Shono foregrounds the nonhuman and more-than-human by focusing on scale and agency, and thus forces the viewer into a subordinate position. More specifically, here nature, or rather the nature-adjacent, reaches out its tentacles and entangles the human.22 Whereas Al Qadiri has shrunk her oil refinery, Shono augments the scale of his installation, and includes the whole landscape. The result is one of monstrous majesty. Shono’s sprawling Chthulhu spills its black strangeness across the sand and awaits a further awakening. 

Ayman Zedani takes the notion of a monstrous awakening from a long, and in this case, subterranean slumber into a different Petro-Gothic imaginary. The Return of the Old Ones tells the story of how prototaxites, giant prehistoric mushroom-like eukaryotes, reigned over the earth, only to be crushed and petrified into crude. Born in the verdant Saudi province of Asir, Zedani has developed a research-based video and multimedia practice that focuses on ecocritical human-nature relationships. The Return of the Old Ones emphasises Sharae Deckard’s observation that ‘Ecogothic environments are themselves excessive, sites of monstrous fecundity.’23 The opening scenes of the video narrate the primordial formation of planet Earth – a time from before humans ruined it. As the camera pans over the green and blue hues of the planet, the anthropomorphised collective voice of the prototaxites comments: ‘This lush green land that you see before you, abundant with water, buzzing with life, is what used to be here. Dense thickets of vegetation, tightly wound together, drinking deeply from the monsoon rains that were generous to it.’ This ‘monstrous fecundity’ is exemplified by, on the one hand, imagery of green rolling hills that are populated by prototaxites reaching into the sky; and, on the other, by a narration that keeps on challenging the destructive and extractivist role of humans: ‘We were not always rock. You call us prototaxites. We were sentinels of much more. We were green flesh and fluid. Tissue and spore-bearing.’ Monstrous mushrooms and ferocious fungi have become leading motifs in Ecogothic and ecohorror narratives because of their ambiguous status: they are neither plant nor vegetal and thrive in environments of decay.24 A video sequence of mushrooms sprouting at breakneck speed illustrates this cycle of growth, putrefaction and rebirth: ‘As we ate through the corpses, we digested their souls and decomposed their bodies to ashes and soil. We burnt with the poisons but then turned the toxins into elixirs. The land nourished itself on the spoils of the perished.’

Still, the natural cycle of life and death is haunted in The Return of the Old Ones. Its title suggests a return: a ghostly and troubled revenant in the form of oil. The oil encounter occurs when the narrator invites us to join them deeper and deeper into the earth, until we see a black wormhole, after which the screen turns fully black. Here, deep underground, is where we meet oil at its site of origin: ‘It gets darker and darker until we hit black. Not just any black. It is a thick, slick, moving, alive kind of darkness. It is the compressed weight of the dead that has morphed into new life: oil.’ The screen fills with a thick, black, viscous, curling, and swirling substance. The imagery is both mesmerising and horrific, but it also signals a rupture in the video’s narrative. If anything, humans now turn monstrous and violent as images of an inferno accompany the narration: ‘You cut through your planet, burning, pillaging, obliterating everything to get to us.’ Bart H. Welling challenges Petro-Gothic imagery for ‘framing petroleum and its associated infrastructures as abject, irremediable, out-of-place – and, simultaneously, visually fascinating –monstrosities.’25 While Zedani introduces such imagery at the end of the video in the form of a burning inferno and gas flares, the work actually returns us to the promise of life. Ultimately, we do not find the destructive petro-gloom critiqued by Welling. Rather, Zedani, like Shono, renders humans soberingly insignificant in the larger interplanetary scheme. In the video’s closing scene, spores reach other galaxies and start life anew, albeit with a typical undercurrent of Petro-Gothic dread and haunting: ‘That is not the end of our story, or of yours. It is merely the beginning of another. Until the next chapter unfolds, we will return to the old silence, and wait.’