An Incomplete Calendar

A forgotten musical record connects Caracas and Tehran, revealing the untold stories of oil not as a commodity, but as a bargaining chip for the liberation struggle in Palestine and the building of Pan-Arab solidarity in the 1960s and 1970s.

An Incomplete Calendar is the final segment in the trilogy of essay films in which artist and researcher Sanaz Sohrabi explores how visual cultures developed alongside the history of oil extraction in Iran, North Africa and West Asia. The first two segments, One Image, Two Acts (2020) and Scenes of Extraction (2023), draw on footage from the British Petroleum archive, created to promote its colonial projects. The latest film relies on an intriguing historical curiosity, an unusual musical document produced in Venezuela. In 1980, the Choir of the Central University (Orfeón Universitario de la Universidad Central) recorded an album to celebrate the 20th anniversary of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), an organization that was founded to oppose the „Big Oil“ cartel (composed of seven sister companies – Exxon, Texaco, Standard Oil, Mobil Oil, Gulf Oil, British Petroleum, and Shell) and enable peoples from decolonized oil-rich countries to acquire control over own resources. Each song on the album Rhymes and Songs for OPEC is inspired by the folklore repertoire of one of the member countries, and its production is based on phonetic transcriptions, apostrophizing the promised rapprochement between colonized and oppressed peoples.

Drawing on this precious musical-archival artifact, Sohrabi presents a different history of OPEC, presenting it as an axis of solidarity that was launched in 1959 at the first Arab Oil Congress in Cairo, where oil, as a resource, was not understood as an instrument of neoliberal domination, but as a means of political pressure and a support for the liberation movements of the global south, especially Palestine. In a multilayered and ambiguous, richly researched and presented film form, the director rearranges elements from her previous multimedia installation of the same name. Sohrabi brings together various visual archives – records, postage stamps, letters, magazines, films and photographs – in order to map the political ambivalences arising from the clash of militant nationalism and decolonial politics in the turbulent period between 1950 and 1980.

This complex geopolitical portrait, by means of grandiose archival material, in an unexpected way brings together two countries that have recently found themselves again under the attack of American imperialism, Iran and Venezuela, and in the midst of the current global turmoil acts as a timely intervention, and a source of important knowledge about the history of oil, colonialism and resistance.