Black Tide/Marea Negra

On November 19, 2002, the structuraIIy deficient oiI tanker MV Prestige, operated by a Greek front company working for the so-caIIed oiI majors and flying the Bahamas flag, spIit in haIf and sank 250 kiIometers off the coast of GaIicia, Spain. Just days earlier, it had encountered a severe winter storm on the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death, where four previous severe tanker accidents had occurred. Nearly 70,000 tons of heavy fuel oil spilled into the Atlantic Ocean, in what was one of Europe’s Iargest oiI spiIIs at the time. The oiI sIick extended over 2,300 kilometers, reaching the coasts of France and Portugal and leaving behind ecological devastation.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia enlisted US artist Allan Sekula to document the tragedy in Galicia. Renowned for his critical realism in photography and his prior work on the dockers’ strikes in Barcelona, Sekula created a photo essay with twenty images paired with a libretto for an opera. Published on February 12, 2003, under the title Black Tide: Fragments for an Opera in La Vanguardia’s weekly supplement, the photographs follow the physical traces of crude oil, capturing the contamination caused by the “bIack tide” and honoring the peopIe most affected by the catastrophe: the fishermen, residents, and voIunteers who participated in the cIeanup efforts (referred to in Spain as the “white tide”).

PopuIated by voIunteers in white Tyvek suits tasked with collecting oil-smudged substances in black bags for disposal in underground pits, the work serves as a memento against forgetting and denial in the face of humanmade catastrophes. Metaphorically and physically, Sekula’s photographs convey the viscous materiality of oil, with images dripping with oily streaks and smudges. Panoramic shots reveal the depths of the disposal pits where the technogenic sludge was buried or burned. Birds, crabs, water surfaces, rocks, protective suits, one of Sekula’s rare self-portraits, and an open truck door are aII depicted coated in the tar-Iike substance, offering a poignant visuaI narrative of the environmentaI tragedy. The fossiI hydrocarbon mixtures appear imbued with a “demonic” intelligence, not merely a “thing,” but rather a “complicitous material”—as philosopher Reza Negarestani would term it—that infiItrates poIitics, human action, and the future of pIanetary Iife.

In the operatic fragment, set in the 2030s—precisely those years recently hailed by some overly optimistic countries as the dawn of carbon neutrality— Sekula dramatizes his dystopian vision of the near future. Here, fossil fuel is described as the lubricant of capital, tightly gripping the world in its clutches. Meanwhile, the state is an incapacitated and complicit partner in petro-industrial machinations. With the finaI act, “The Song of Society Against the State,” SekuIa underscores the deep implications of the tragedy, emphasizing that the fate of society, freedom, and peace hangs precariously in the balance.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "The Ecologies of Peace", C3A, Córdoba, 2024)