“THE BLACK WHALE is an exhibition project which arises from the crisis provoked by the accident of the Prestige oil-tanker. On a first stage, its purpose is to remember and document an event which was central for Galicia and Spain, in the tenth anniversary of the oil-tanker sinking — 240 miles West of Finisterrae. The black tide which devastated and contaminated the Galician coasts — from November 13th 2002 to well-advanced 2003 — was the trigger for a social mobilization which demanded that something of its kind would happen ‘Never More’ (‘Nunca Máis’; this sentence became a widely known slogan in Galician language). The protests that followed in Galicia for several months, against the lack of maritime control run parallel to the demonstrations occurred in Spain by then, denouncing the Spanish participation in the second Iraq war (provoked, in a way, for the control of oil resources in the Middle East).

The exhibition departs from this specific reality —one of the most intense social and political moments in the last decades in Spain — to contextualize and interpret it on a wider spectre. Taking the oil industry and the multiple factors surrounding it as one of the main visible or physical manifestations of contemporary societies, the project opens itself to subjects as diverse as nature exploitation, colonialism, the history of modernity, the myth of an endless progress, maritime commerce, globalization, or war.

Taking the aforementioned as a starting point, the exhibition develops these ideas both spatially and temporally, in two vectors interweaved through a parcours which combines art works and documentary materials. Together with episodes related to Galicia: from the sinking of the Urquiola oil-tanker in 1976 to present — with an emphasis on the Prestige, the project gathers works connected to places as distant as Alaska, Iraq, Mexico, Venezuela, Caucasus, or Nigeria.

From a chronological point of view, the project addresses multiple historical moments, swinging from the remote past from which oil comes (“that Arcanum trash-yard which positions and still leads geopolitics nowadays”, according to Xavier Rubert de Ventós), to a Sci-Fi future. This extreme temporal simultaneity bestows the project with a singular richness of meaning, since it makes co-exist the geological, archaeological, and entropic discourses of Robert Smithson (e. g.), the hallucinated vision of apocalypses that Werner Herzog filmed while documenting the Kuwaiti oil fields on flames after the first Gulf War, in 1991, or the social criticism rooted on the present by authors like Allan Sekula, Alberte Pagan or Ursula Biemann, among others.

This combination of space and time helps the appearance of a whole constellation of meanings which exceed by far the mere exploitative or distributive activities characteristic of the oil industry: environmental, ecological, geopolitical, economical, colonial, and activist issues go together with poetic notions such as risk, decadence, the epic of a search for resources on unlikely horizons, or the task, bound to fail, but heroic (like Sisyphus myth), of those who fought against tragedies provoked by repeated spills in places like Galicia, Alaska, the French coast, or the Mexican Gulf.

With the constant, repetitive and suffocating reference of oil — such a vulgar, viscous, and heavy element, regarding its materiality; but attractive, plastically, and symbolically, from the point of view of its meaning — the summa of the artists’ works build a project in which the visual goes together with narration, theatricality, and even a filmic experience, which transmits with spectacularity, drama, and emotion, a whole web of discourses and contents which deal with some of the most urgent issues of our times.

Hence, the original insight into a local event aims to become a panoramic vision of the contemporary world nowadays, of its recent and remote past, and its uncertain future. The Prestige shipwreck and the catastrophe that it caused in the Spanish coast transform themselves into a universal myth. The exhibition departs from the material — from a fact — in order to elaborate an account which places itself mid-way from historical objectivity, and the subjective, critical, romantic, and sometimes sublime visions of artists.

The title of the exhibition tries to synthesize all these dimensions and the numerous layers conveyed by the art works. The black whale is an expression taken from an interview by artist and hermit known as “El alemán de Camelle” (“the German from Camelle”, a.k.a. Man). In that interview, Man said that a gigantic black whale appeared to himself on a dream — time before the Prestige accident — devastating the “Death Coast”, like a western Godzilla. A dream that turned out to be premonitory when a few days later, the Prestige heeled on a storm, adrift for a week, spilled out its petroleum cargo, and finally sank on a 4,000-meters abyss in the Atlantic Ocean. The image of a mythological beast, which reminds the monstrous creatures that the Roman historian Estrabon placed on the Finisterrae seas, or the white whale in the novel Moby Dick, appears as a representation full of symbolism regarding the oil-tanker, its ruinous situation, and its terrible fate.

Equally, as in Herman Melville’s novel the tireless search for the whale represented the yearn to cross all the known boundaries for the sake of progress (whale oil was one of the most demanded raw materials in the 19th century), and the craziness that human beings can reach measuring themselves against nature; cases as the Prestige, or the more recent Deepwater Horizon, bring to present the same mixture of obsession, greed, exploitation, and arrogance which characterized captain Ahab, the sailors which followed him blindly on his vertiginous odyssey towards disaster and, from an allegorical point of view, the own society, avid of natural resources, they belonged to.

Following Moby Dick’s spirit and the artists present in the exhibition, THE BLACK WHALE not only pretends to be a discourse about environmental issues, but a metaphor of the complex relations of human beings with nature. Taking up again Prestige’s history vivifies these debates, connects them to the present cycle of protests worldwide, and highlights the fragility of a progress model, in a critical moment, called to redefine modernity as well as an alternative scale of values.”

Pedro de Llano
Exhibition’s curator