- bsteininger
Vienna, Austriaover 5 years ago
Back in Europe – but still in the petrochemical corridor! Amazing, how the landscapes at Louisiana and Vienna, with the OMV-refinery at the banks of the Danube river resemble each other. Everything might be smaller, everything might be cleaner but it is the same hydrocarbons that reign here and there. Wunderbar together! - bsteininger
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
over 5 years ago
“There is no right life in the wrong one.” Theodor W. Adorno’s famous line from “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life” matches with my feelings at ‘A Studio in the Woods’ on my last day in Louisiana. A hippiesque party not just with the ubiquitous stupid plastic spoons and plates, but sponsored by ‘Valero Energy Foundation’ (‘Valero Energy Corporation’ = biggest refinery company in the US) not just feels wrong, it is wrong. - bsteininger
New Orleans, Louisiana, USAover 5 years ago
The seminar ‘commodity flows’ starts with a pedagogic imposition: a two page bureaucratic form. All the colorful commodities (pharmaceuticals, sugar cane, sediments, food, money…) brought to the seminar are categorized and homogenized. It takes quite a while for everyone to fill out the forms, and it generates resistance. Why shall I write down my name here? Does anyone think, this category here could work?
Great! The more bureaucracy grinds, and the more we feel that, the better. All commodification starts with an imposition like this. There would be no transport of soy or cement or oil on the river without paperwork, and I imagine, real papers are even more crazy that ours!
- bsteininger
Burton Lane, St. James Parish, Louisiana, USAover 5 years ago
St. James Parish. Can anyone see the small strip of homes between the storage tanks? People live there, just in the middle of what is the most dense collection of petrochemical storage tanks in a single community in the US! Is this a place for an Anthropocene discussion? Or would not just a reasonable state with laws from the Holocene that are just recognized by this Stone age industry, be enough to make this nightmare disappear? - bsteininger
Donaldsonville, Louisiana, USAover 5 years ago
Donaldsonville, CF Industries, is one of the biggest Ammonia plants in the US. What we are just passing in our canoes is a planetary reactor: nitrogen from the atmosphere is put together with hydrogen from natural gas from the lithosphere, to make the industrial biosphere grow faster. The production of artificial ammonia from the elements by help of an already artificial iron-kali-potash catalyst was high-tech in 1910. But it is still this process that makes industrial agriculture work.
From Donaldsonville nitrogen products are shipped into the world as we just see at the terminal of the plant. But even if they go upstream to fertilize the soy and corn belts, most of the industrial molecules would see the place of their production in Donaldsonville again, as they are washed from the fields into the rivers and thus into the Mississippi river flowing by.
- bsteininger
Plaquemine Island, Louisiana, USAover 5 years ago
Искусственное солнце. Evening at our campsite at Plaquemine Island, Nov 1, 2019. Across the river the gigantic DOW chemical plant with further facilities by Poly One, Air Liquide, Shintech...
'Sunset' has a very specific meaning here. Thousands of electric lights and a handful of flares make it mean ‘refineryrise’, too. The underground sun is taking over, when celestial sun is setting.
As we sit by the camp fire the strange corporate hymn of Russian Gazprom comes to my mind and its last lines: ‘Let’s drink to you, lets drink to us, the drink to all the Russian gas’ and then: ‘Let's drink to all those who brought out of the earth this artificial sun’
Давай за нас, давай за вас,
давай за весь российский газ,
Чтоб не кончался, чтобы был,
Хоть нелегко даетсья.
Давай за нас, давай за вас,
давай за весь российский газ,
За всех, кто из земли добыл
Искусственное солнце.
- bsteininger
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USAover 5 years ago
process landscape, Baton Rouge, Exxon Refinery, even from less distance. getting this near to the organism of the refinery almost got us arrested. as a reminder of this experience I will keep the piece of the capillaria of the petromonster as a relic - the sacred, the cruel, the beauty, the horror, geohistory and hypermodernism, the land of the free and us-angst... - bsteininger
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USAover 5 years ago
process landscape from less distance, EXXON refinery, baton rouge. you won't get closer. but: everyone is already closer. 500'000 barrels of science-fashioned molecules leave the plant per day and connect us intimately with the illuminated yet black box like architecture - bsteininger
Vienna, Austriaover 5 years ago
process-landscape from the distance. 'shell-abc', volume 5, 'erdölspaltung' (cracking), heidelberg mainz 1955, fluid bed reactor in abstraction
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You've reached the end!
You've reached the end!