The Price of Oil (2019)

The Price of Oil is a 20-minute experimental animation that reimagines archival materials drawn from digital and print sources. Developed through more than a year of archival research, the work adopts archiveology as both a method and a critical practice of combining printed archival imagery, collage, stop-motion animation, and programmed interventions within video-editing software to create an essayistic video on the interconnected themes of labor, exploitation and disaster.

The animation is accompanied by a composition originally written in 1980 by American composer Frederic Rzewski and performed in 2019 by the Buffalo-based music collective Wooden Cities. The composition was inspired by the Alexander L. Kielland disaster, in which a floating oil-drilling platform capsized in the North Sea, killing 123 workers. The work centers on two distinct but interconnected figures: an oil dealer working in the Rotterdam market and a worker who survives the Kielland disaster. Although the two never meet, their lives form what Rzewski described as “complementary parts of a superstructure,” governed by the opposing pressures of greed and need. Caught within a tragic system beyond their control, their parallel stories reveal how the pursuit of profit is inseparable from the vulnerability and suffering of those whose labor sustains it.

Through collage, animation, appropriation of archival images, performance, and music, The Price of Oil invites us to think on labor, exploitation, and the devastating human cost of industrial systems designed to place profit above human life.

credits

director: Mani Mehrvarz
animation: Maryam Muliaee
original Music: Frederic Rzewski
performance: Wooden Cities