Between Modernity and Its Darker Side
A new commissioned essay by Francisco Llinás Casas
‘Oil is fantastic and induces fantasies. Oil wealth had the power of a myth,’ wrote José Ignacio Cabrujas, a Venezuelan playwright and the narrator of Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 feature Araya, the closing film of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2025. One year on, with her debut feature An Incomplete Calendar, Sanaz Sohrabi looks right into the eyes of twentieth-century oil-fuelled fantasies of modernisation to reveal how extractivism’s violent and colonial nature renders futile the myths of emancipating and decolonising on the back of oil wealth.
Quite a lot has happened between last year’s screening of Araya and the UK premiere of An Incomplete Calendar at this year’s edition. The political and military tension that has escalated around Iran, Venezuela and the Middle East over the last few months seems to imbue Sohrabi’s film with an aura of timeliness and bitter relevance. But the film is about much more than the historical foreshadowing of today’s geopolitical situation in relation to extractivism, neocolonialism and militarisation. The urgency of this film rests not on the recent events in Venezuela or Iran, but on how the colonial logics of extraction, and its underpinning violence towards nature and society, continue to shape our imagined futures, our readings of the past, and the material conditions of our present.
An Incomplete Calendar examines the modern futures that petrodollars helped to conjure via the shipwrecks of oil-modernisation those dreams left behind. Using postage stamps, archival film and audio, interviews and intimate scenes the filmmaker captured in Tehran and Caracas, Sohrabi scrutinises the history of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), revealing the hopes of unity, progress and decolonisation underpinning its formation. As the film reveals, however, those dreams rested on the same structures of oppression that had already cast these nations to the global and economic periphery. In so doing, the film discloses the intimate connection between modernity and – as decolonial thinker Walter Mignolo put it – its ‘darker side’: coloniality.
By the 1970s, the price of crude petroleum had increased fourfold, shaking up the world economy and rapidly driving money from first world nations into the oil-exporting countries of the Global South. These economic shifts fuelled the illusion that modernity, progress and industrialisation lay at the fingertips of OPEC countries, and that the flow of history could be effectively reversed by the flow of oil. The nationalisation of oil industries emerged as an unequivocal and unifying avenue for these postcolonial nations to achieve full emancipation. In Sohrabi’s film, those dreams of unity and solidarity best crystallise in the archival recordings of the Concert Choir of Universidad Central de Venezuela, whose phonetic renditions of traditional songs from OPEC member states drew the contours of potential multipolar and multilingual futures.
Attempting to materialise such hopes, projects of modernisation flooded the political agendas of oil nations. Capital cities like Tehran and Caracas became inundated with art and buildings attesting to the belief that petrodollars could refine the nation just like oil was refined into commodities, transforming modernity into a tangible reality. But as one of Sohrabi’s interlocutors puts it, the debates about sovereignty and progress that oil fostered focused more on who got to participate in the conversation and less on how those futures could be imagined from a decolonial perspective. Alexander Calder’s transnational sculptural presence across Tehran and Caracas becomes, in Sohrabi’s hands, the most eloquent symptom of those inherited structures of power, showcasing a modernity that adhered to Western aesthetics and, not unlike weapons and other imported commodities, drove petrodollars straight back into the first world. In the end, this perpetuated a colonial hierarchy in which nations exporting raw materials are relegated to the economic, cultural and geopolitical periphery of the Global North; a hierarchy that still exists today.
As the sound of Farsi fills the now-crumbling Aula Magna in Caracas, the archival aesthetics of oil-modernisation are woven together across borders through the immaterial cartographies of sound, language and translation. It is in the gaps between image and sound, origin and translation, promise and ruin that Sohrabi’s most urgent provocations emerge, hinted at by the mysterious appearance of a moving mirror in the shape of Calder’s sculptures. Can extractivism and anticolonialism coexist? Can we imagine a collective future outside extractivism and the West’s timeline of progress? What, then, would be our role in imagining such a future?
The UK premiere of An Incomplete Calendar is presented in partnership with Open City Documentary Festival. Francisco Llinás Casas is a Venezuelan artist and researcher based in Glasgow. His work examines Venezuela’s oil-fuelled modernisation and diaspora culture. Francisco completed a residency with Alchemy in 2025.
