Director’s Statement

SAHNEHAYE ESTEKHRAJ (Scenes of Extraction) is the second film episode in my ongoing investigation of the visual grammars of extraction during the operations of British Petroleum in Iran and the broader Asia. Over the past five years, I have been researching the early geological surveys and seismic mappings that were done extensively in the southwestern provinces of Iran wherein the majority of the oil fields were discovered and developed at the onset of the 20th century. Photographs, films, and magazines used in SAHNEHAYE ESTEKHRAJ are drawn from the British Petroleum’s film library and photographic collections along with my personal archive gathered over a meticulous five-year-long archival research process. As a filmmaker and researcher working at the intersection of documentary media practice and visual arts research, this film is guided by the archive as a conceptual prism, material object, and imaginative practice. I examine the archival temporalities and evidentiary aesthetics enmeshed in the ethnographic photography practices in the early colonial explorations of oil in Iran. In doing so, I consider the archive as a portal to an elsewhere and to an elsewhen, wherein the archival material are both the evidence and the crime scene. SAHNEHAYE ESTEKHRAJ further navigates the archive as a modality and threshold to develop tactical, speculative, and experimental artistic strategies to refuse, animate, and disavow the orientation of time and space in the colonial episteme.

Sanaz Sohrabi, SAHNEHAYE ESTEKHRAJ (Scenes of Extraction) (Still)

SAHNEHAYE ESTEKHRAJ further explores the dialectical relation to the petro-futurity embedded in these archival configurations. On the one hand, the seismographic methods and the geological imaginaries made it possible to visualize the subterranean oil-bearing layers to connect the geological past to an imagined future by creating a material continuity between crude oil and its invisible descendant. On the other hand, the ethnographic surveys documented the myriad of ethnic and tribal norms and livelihoods to create a binary distinction between the modern and non-modern. At the same time, these ethnographic surveys were what became known as “salvage ethnography” in anthropology, which refers to a process of preserving the past, which is soon to be destroyed and erased, for the future. This tension can also be explored in images of the subterranean as a form of continuity between the geological past and petroleum’s future, which is set against the ethnographic images as the portraits of a nation soon to be differentiated from its non-modern and tribal past.

The infrastructures of oil have never been divorced from the representational realm, and the overlapping modalities of extraction, ranging from extractable matter and images, is one of the main focuses of this film.

Tracing the connection between the infrastructures of oil, the camera, and the archive, I focus on the parallel production of geological surveys and the ethnographic constructions through film and photography. This film asks the viewer to consider how and why a geological camera became tethered to an ethnographic camera and what this entanglement tells us about the racialized social stratification of geology. The infrastructures of oil have never been divorced from the representational realm, and the overlapping modalities of extraction, ranging from extractable matter and images, is one of the main focuses of this film.
SAHNEHAYE ESTEKHRAJ asks the viewer to question the social, material, human, and ecological parameters involved in the extractive processes. If the assumption is that extraction solely involves the earth, what happens if we rethink the material relations of extraction? How can we rethink extraction’s social loss and cultural erasure? SAHNEHAYE ESTEKHRAJ is an active act of listening to images and sounding the images.

Sanaz Sohrabi

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