Thursday, July 13, 2017
Gilbert Scott Building - Room 656A (University of Glasgow)
After a brief theoretical overview, this presentation argues that Mazzotta’s award-winning documentary delivers an ecological narrative that highlights the imbrication existing between matter (in this instance, fossil fuel), human beings, and territory. As it refreshingly avoids to hide oil’s representation behind the “charismatic term ‘energy’” (LeMenager 2013, 185), it provides a poignant and aware-raising account of the health effects, and overall environmental trauma brought by the neocolonial introduction of the SARAS oil refinery in the once pristine area surrounding Sarrok, a village in the South-Eastern part of Sardinia (and, by extension, in similarly ill-conceived industrial sites). By exemplifying a “critical and protestatory response to oil” (Barrett & Worden 2014, xxvii), this documentary does not only represent one among the many possible Mediterranean ecocritical case studies dealing with this substance. Even more relevantly, the story it tells ultimately reminds us of the pedagogical and “decolonizing” role that this kind of narrative may have, as it contributes to re-engage, re-kindle and re-surge critical “knowledges and sensibilities” (Mignolo 2016, xv) that today many of us keep tend to willingly forget or disavow in our daily routines of consumption.
