School of Oil and Water

contemplate your relations with petroleum through a collection of objects and activities

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Experience hosted by Oil Ancestors

School of Oil and Water is a mail-order kit of experiences inviting you to examine your relations with petroleum through a collection of unique objects and activities over the course of 7 days: Day 1 : With time and temperature changes, the kerogen in oil shale rocks changes to petroleum. Holding Kerogen by Kate Joranson invites you engage physically and emotionally with a kerogen rock. A series of photos, handwritten questions and observations, and a set of soft cotton paper serve as guides for creating intimacy via deep listening and touch. Day 2 : You Are Made of Stardust and Microplastics: Meditation for Extinction is an embodied meditation designed by Liz Ensz and Skye Forte. Using a rock-shell made from recycled #2 plastic (HDPE) and a guiding video, this piece explores the transformation of matter, deep time, and the acceptance of our own extinction. Day 3: Mixtape for Breaking Up with Oil... and Falling Back in Love by Lindsey french is both a soundtrack and a smelltrack made to accompany the looping, gooey angst of longing and heartache involved in redefining a relationship which seems impossible to change. Day 4: Alex Young’s Long Shadows Glow in the Dark is an open-ended astragalomancy (casting lots) poem intended to be consulted with the assistance of the included dice (D10, D6, D6). Drift with the text or develop systems and approaches to divination that possess personal meaning for you. How will you choose to commune with your manifold relationships with multitudinous actors in energy, oil, biota, elements, others? In what ways do they choose to commune with you? Day 5: Drifters by Nica Ross and Ginger Brooks Takahashi is a video board game, set in the Mesozoic early Atlantic Ocean. Your plastic playing pieces compose a bloom of many tiny zooplankton, who live as drifters, moving at the whims of the current and forces beyond their control. This game offers players an opportunity to explore our kinship and consider the lived experiences of this wide diversity of species whose bodies we now call fuel. Day 6: Remember when your dead bodies… by Fereshteh Toosi, is a letterpress broadsheet poem, printed with a blind emboss of macroalgae (seaweed) from Biscayne Bay in Miami. Day 7: When you've completed the full School of Oil and Water curriculum, we invite you to share about your experiences by uploading photos, video, voice memos, sounds, and/or writing. Please tag @oil_ancestors or use one or both of the following hashtags so we can find you: #SchoolofOilandWater #SoOW If you prefer to text or email, please share your responses directly at oilancestors-at-gmail.com or 312/870/0464... Show More