White Oil

White Oil engages with the ecologies of resource extraction, exploitation and circulation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. Focusing on the quarries in the West Bank the research explores the complex political entanglements of land, labour, military, nationalist identities and sovereign state in the region. The research addresses the way in which the quarries in the West Bank are not just industrial spaces in which labour and excavation of raw material takes place, but also paradigmatic and metaphorical spaces around sedimentation, stratified layers, excavation and transformation and how these dynamics are inseparable from the disruptive spaces of colonialism and globalisation. The research is the result of extensive rigorous scholarly and field research between different disciplines (post colonial theory, post humanism, eco criticism, new ethnography, sociology, philosophy, aesthetics, film and photography), actors, territories and ideas to produce original photography, film and text work. The research is significant in that it contributes to: post humanism by engaging with both human and non-human life forms with equal significance; new understandings of the geopolitical and spatial relations of the West Bank by drawing out the explicit and hidden dynamics of this region; the role of art in creating new perceptions of the experiences of individuals and cultures and how the artist becomes embedded in a place in the production of work. The research draws on local and consensual knowledge engaging in the particularities of the quarries in the West Bank, as well as situating the research within collective interaction. Essential to the making of the work is a collaborative mode of address with the participants, the owners, workers and security guards, engaged in the filmmaking process, and the role of the artist, as filmmaker, activist and ethnographer coming under scrutiny.