The End of Naturalia at the 7th Lisbon Architecture Triennale – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology – Portugal
In Petroleum, Iwan Baan shifts the observer’s attention to the vast bitumen extraction operations in Alberta, Canada, territories usually perceived merely as “resources to be exploited” rather than places with their own material and political histories. The photographic series functions almost as a vertical archaeology of the technosphere: the seemingly homogeneous ground becomes an archive of layers inscribed with machines, drainage systems, craters, and industries. Placed within the context of Fluxes, the work suggests that the weight of the contemporary city is not limited to its visible buildings but begins in the very process of making the subterranean accessible and transformable into global infrastructure, a gesture that forces us to reconsider the idea of the city as something delimited by buildings and streets, and instead see it as a chain of material and ecological effects extending across continents.