The Decolonizing Energy art program brings together works that engage with the cultural, ecological, and political legacies of extraction. Through a wide range of media and perspectives, the program reflects on how landscapes, bodies, and communities are shaped by energy systems, while also envisioning alternative ways of sensing, living, and imagining. These artistic explorations expand the conversation on energy justice beyond policy discourses and invite audiences to engage with new horizons of resilience, creativity, and collective possibility.

Natascha De Vasconcellos Otoya, participant

Artist Bio: Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya earned her PhD in environmental history from Georgetown University in 2024, focusing on the early 20th-century development of Brazil’s oil industry. Her interdisciplinary research integrates geology and ecology to explore deep-time narratives of humanity’s energy pursuits. Starting in May 2025, Natascha will embark on a postdoctoral project examining the transformation of Brazil’s center-east table mountains, where the native Cerrado ecology is being converted into large-scale plantations for exports like soybeans and cotton. This work continues her approach of blending geological and ecological perspectives to understand environmental change.

Synopsis: These videos document two bicycle expeditions that were a central part of Otoya’s PhD research on the Bay of All-Saints in Bahia, Brazil. This region, the birthplace of Brazil’s oil industry, has been profoundly shaped by extraction since 1939. Covering approximately 150km across four oil towns, these field trips served as the primary research for two chapters of her dissertation, which explores the geological and environmental history of Brazil’s first oil fields. The use of bicycles was a deliberate choice, offering a unique, low-carbon way to experience the landscape. The slow, immersive pace of cycling allowed for a rich sensory experience, enabling us to truly feel the landscape: from the wind and sun to the distinct smells of this petrochemical region. By blending this on-the-ground experience with archival research, these videos offer a closer look at the deep socio-ecological changes that have unfolded around the Bay of All-Saints over the last 80 years.

By emphasizing slowness, Otoya is working in a tradition of decolonial thought epitomized by the Afro-Brazilian geographer Milton Santos who wrote, “Now we are discovering that, in cities, the time that commands or that will command in the future is actually the time of slow people. Power comes from the ‘slow people’ rather than from those who control speed….Those who, within the city, have the most mobility end up seeing very little of the city and of the world. Their intimacy with prefabricated images is their perdition. Their comfort, which they do not want to give up, comes precisely from their cohabitation with these images. The ‘slow’ people, for whom these images are only a mirage, cannot for long periods engage with a perverse imaginary and discover fantasies. This is how they escape the totalitarianism of rationality….it is the poor in the city who can look more fixedly to the future.”

Otoya’s videos also underscore how our scholarly encounters with energy systems are embodied, whether cycling through Brazil, shuffling through musty archives, or convening for discussions in global hubs like Doha. The energy logics of research are shot through with the coloniality of the petroscape; the pressure to research and publish at speed threatens to turn us into the “fast people” of Santos’s city. What if the next time you moved through the petroscape, you traveled on a bike? What things might you see, feel, or smell that are inaccessible by metro or car? What future possibilities are opened by refusing speed?
Source: Milton Santos, The Nature of Space, translated by Brenda Baletti (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 224.

Exhibition Space: 2C11, Georgetown University in Qatar

The Future Was Desert (Part I & II), 2016

Sophia Al Maria, participant ((Part I & II), 2016 (Single-channel HD video, 5 mins 17 secs (Part I); 4 mins 35 secs (Part II)) Courtesy of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha

Artist Bio: Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice spans film, narrative text, and critical writing. Raised between the Pacific Northwest and the Gulf, and educated at the American University in Cairo and Goldsmiths, London, she draws on sources as diverse as Arabic poetry, science fiction, and lived experiences of pollution and climate change. Her work probes questions of representation, technology, consumer culture, and the uncertain futures of planetary life, often through speculative and futurist lenses.

Al-Maria is widely recognized for coining the concept of Gulf Futurism (with musician Fatima Al Qadiri), exploring how the Gulf embodies forms of accelerated modernity that unsettle Western imaginaries of the future. Across her installations, films, and writings, she examines how agency, chance, and narrative shape human existence in the face of ecological precarity and social transformation.

Her work has been presented at major international venues, including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Tate Britain (London), Whitechapel Gallery (London), Serpentine Galleries (London), the New Museum (New York), the 9th Gwangju Biennale (South Korea), and many others. She is also the author of The Girl Who Fell to Earth (2012), Virgin with a Memory (2014), and Sad Sack (2019).

Al-Maria’s practice is deeply attuned to the legacies of extraction, environmental change, and cultural memory. Her work opens new ways of imagining energetic futures beyond consumerist and colonial logics, while foregrounding storytelling as a form of energy, justice, and resistance.

Synopsis: The Future Was Desert (Part I & II) is a compact but forceful video installation that reimagines the desert as a stage for reflecting on time, energy, and the afterlives of extraction. The work takes its conceptual key from an epigraph by the British writer J. G. Ballard: “Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.” The desert in Sophia Al-Maria’s vision is not an empty backdrop or a timeless void. Instead, it is a place where the hydrocarbon modernity of the Gulf collides with geological time, and where the promises of endless growth under fossil fuels are revealed as already spent.

The structure of The Future Was Desert is deceptively simple. Al-Maria edits together her own footage with fragments of found video from the internet, constructing a collage that resists linear narrative. The pacing is abrupt, almost jarring, producing sudden shifts in register that feel like fault lines opening in time itself. Instead of offering a continuous storyline, the work immerses viewers in a temporal atmosphere, an affective space where the future feels more like residue than promise. What we encounter are fragments, echoes, and loops that suggest a time already fractured. By evoking the sense of living in the ruins of the future, the videos transform exhaustion itself into an aesthetic register, one that viewers can feel in their bodies as much as think within their minds.

Since its debut in 2016, The Future Was Desert has traveled widely, presented at moving-image festivals, climate-culture programs, and art institutions across Europe, North America, and the Gulf.

Exhibition Space: Car Barn, Georgetown University in Qatar