Landscapes in Motion
Curated by Firat Oruc, Trish Kahle, and Victoria Googasian
Landscapes in Motion, curated as part of Decolonizing Energy: The Past, Present, and Future of Energy Justice, 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.
Charcoal | Residues and Residuals
Through six frescoes, Pascale Marthine Tayou attends closely to the material and residual: who and what is left after consumption or abandonment. From Cameroonian street vendors known as sauveteurs whom the municipal government tried to sweep from historic neighborhoods in Douala, to the artefacts of the oil economy, to charcoals and chalks. In the frescoes exhibited as part of Landscapes in Motion his attention to materiality of charcoal draws us to its many possibilities in artistic expression. The frescoes also gesture toward charcoal’s importance as an energy source in many West African societies. By rearranging our encounter with the material, he unsettles the distance between production and expression, pushing us toward new encounters with place.
Exhibition Space: Ground Floor Faculty Corridor, Georgetown University in Qatar, October 4 – December 5, 2025
Power Lines, Everyday Currents
These contemporary works come from the ARAK Collection, an independent, Qatar-based initiative dedicated to African art through exhibitions, publications, research, and educational programs. The works included here highlight how artists engage with the entanglements of urban spaces, labor, migration, infrastructure, and everyday life across the continent. Guided by an Afropolitan sensibility, these works register the enduring weight of colonial energy systems and extractive histories on both people and place, yet they counter such weight by asserting movement, vitality, and change. They emphasize circulation, adaptation, and transformation of people, resources, and power. Through this dynamism, these works invite viewers to envision horizons beyond dispossession, where creativity and collective imagination spark new forms of energy, justice, and belonging.
Artists: ElMouiz Abdelbagi Alogaimi (Sudan), Trevor Aloka (Uganda), Girma Berta (Ethiopia), Arnold Birungi (Uganda), Mohamed Bushra (Sudan), Nelson Ijaka’a (Kenya), Patrick Karanja (Kenya), Ismael Kateregga (Uganda), Aly Kilua (Tanzania), Eli Kobeli (South Africa), Asanda Kupa (South Africa), Elias Mung’ora (Kenya), Malibongwe Shangase (South Africa), Mario Pedro Soares (Mozambique), Gerald Tabata (South Africa), Themba Khumalo (South Africa)
Exhibition Space: First Floor Faculty Corridor, Georgetown University in Qatar, October 4 – December 5, 2025
The Future Was Desert (Part I & II), 2016
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: 0A49, Georgetown University in Qatar
Cycling through Petroscapes: The Bicycle as Method for Field Trips
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