by Rebecka Öhrström Kann
Rhymes and Songs for OPEC was recorded by the Concert Choir of Central University of Venezuela in 1980 on the twentieth anniversary of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). This multilingual album of folk songs from the organization’s member countries forms the red thread of Sanaz Sohrabi’s investigations into the latent histories of OPEC’s decolonial ambitions, intertwining both the development of South-South solidarity for autonomy over oil and the movement’s cultural outputs. The histories of energy sovereignty gained visual and cultural identity in stamps, envelopes, magazines and art. Over scenes flicking through these materials Sohrabi adapts communication theorist Marshall McLuhan’s statement “the medium is the message”, declaring that “oil became a medium and message” for decolonial worldmaking. The vinyl itself, made of petroleum hydrocarbons extracted through the chemical processing of oil, becomes a literal solidifying of the political imaginaries symbolised in its recording.
An Incomplete Calendar: Rhymes and Songs for OPEC (2026) is the third in Sohrabi’s trilogy on the relationship between oil and modernity in the late 20th century. The first two films in the series, One Image, Two Acts (2020), and Scenes of Extraction (2023) examine labor and geological exploitation during the operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum, BP) in Iran between 1908 and 1951. The images of these films were built through research into the BP archives and includes the BP sponsored corporate films which aimed to produce a controlled document of the company’s oil extraction for public viewers in the UK. Like Onyeka Igwe’s No Dance, No Palaver (2017-2018), Sohrabi’s films read the colonial archive against the grain, reordering the perceptual information and temporalities of these images through speculative modes of representation and her own research informed prose.
The films lead up to An Incomplete Calendar which studies the post-war nationalization of oil by countries in the Global South as both a tool to resist the continued neocolonialism of former colonial states and as a transnational project of solidarity. Sohrabi’s research for the film is complemented by a narration from filmmakers, scholars and musicians set over archival material, much of which she collected herself on online markets – she first discovered Rhymes and Songs for OPEC on eBay. We hear from both Eduardo Prato Moros and Leonardo Montaño Salas, choir members involved in the recording of the album who provide a first hand account of its production, as well as the historian Laleh Khalili whose scholarship on exploitation and oil has mapped capitalism’s extractive nature in the development of our current crises.
By the mid-twentieth century, US, Britain, and the Netherlands controlled most of the world’s oil production through the “seven sisters” companies, the result of earlier unequal colonial concessions that handed these companies exclusive rights to extract oil from other countries’ lands. The post-war economic expansion was fueled by petroleum, enabling a growing car-dependent suburbia and the replacement of coal in manufacturing and heating. Western modernity increasingly relied on a steady source of oil to function, much of it imported from Arab states that kept little, if any, of the resulting profit. Founded as a cartel in 1960 to challenge Anglo-European domination of the oil market, OPEC aimed to collectively coordinate the production and sale of its member’s petroleum resources. Originally composed of Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the organization later expanded to include states like Algeria, Libya, Ecuador, UAE, and Nigeria.
The circulatory nature of stamps issued by OPEC and newly independent states became an avenue for official displays of oil as a public good. Sohrabi describes them as ‘haptic infrastructure(s)’, operating like political manifestations in themselves where oil emerged as a motif of economic sovereignty and the fuel necessary to propel a state toward a European idea of modernization. In a stamp issued by Iraq, workers in construction overalls stretch out their arms amongst flying white doves. Against towering derricks one man holds a key up parallel to the towers: their access to oil (and the shared future symbolised by it) secured. In the top middle is an image of former president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr from his 1972 speech when he announced the seizing of the foreign monopoly of oil in Iraq, which Sohrabi has also placed as a video excerpt playing on top of the stamps. Here technology and resource nationalization are translated into a public visual story of oil as an instrument in decolonial statebuilding.
These are images made not to be filed in the archival drawer but to be dispensed across networks along with the ideas they relayed. Multiple scenes show Sohrabi sorting piles of envelopes with OPEC stamps. When opened the letters are revealed to be empty of content, a conversation interrupted or left unfulfilled. She narrates that the state-sponsored images of oil “became an archive of their own historical movements and disappearances”, out-living the political projects they once served. In the film, many of the stamps are unused, still held together in neat pairs by thinly dotted borders. Like the title An Incomplete Calendar, their idle nature points to an unfinished history of solidarity, speculating on the possibility such relations leave us in their contemporary absence.
The film’s visual form of archive overlay is a continuation of Sohrabi’s previous moving-image work, bringing several forms of media including print, audio and video together simultaneously. The opening scene of the Aula Magna hall at the Central University of Venezuela, Caracas shows empty chairs and resting instruments in a rehearsal room while music and clips of a performance of Rhymes and Songs for OPEC on the Aula Magna stage is superimposed. This splicing and layering disturbs an orderly historiography that would otherwise put these events safely in the past. Johan Grimonprez’s electric A Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat (2024) on jazz during the Congo crisis comes to mind as another archival documentary looking at the contemporary geopolitical resonance of Cold War independence movements and music as a soft power. Like Grimonprez’s decision to avoid a top down historical narrative by letting the images and music drive the story, Sohrabi is not interested in settling the legitimacy of oil as a decolonial tool. Instead her layering of archival material allows her to trace the conflicting desires conjured in the images of oil.
Oil became a political leverage for the liberation struggle of Palestine even as early as 1967 when several Arab states imposed an oil embargo against countries supporting Israel in response to the Six-Day War. Sohrabi layers a spread of the magazine Naft Al-‘Arab (Arab Oil) with the title “Oil Weapon and the question of Palestine” with a video of crowds in Beirut chanting “Arab oil is a step toward the liberation of Palestine”. Periodicals such as Naft Al-‘Arab which were aimed at a general audience sought to both educate on and discuss the politics of oil for a greater good. Like stamps, these Arabic-language publications allowed the anticolonial imaginaries of oil to cross borders and build international constellations of action where states like Libya funneled oil revenue toward Palestinian liberation movements. While the 1967 embargo is largely considered to have been unsuccessful, the 1973 embargo by OPEC following the Yom Kippur War raised the price from $3.01 US dollars per barrel to $5.12 per barrel and reduced the export of oil from the Middle East to the West by 60-70%. While oil importing countries who provided political and military backing to Israel suffered economically, money was flowing into OPEC countries. The event echoes the larger claim by historian Christopher Dietrich that the nationalization of oil by anti-colonial movements was “the most concentrated nonviolent transfer of global wealth in human history”.
Still, Sohrabi also notes that oil profits largely had to be recycled through European and American banks – “financial infrastructures that are hegemonically controlled by the United States dollar” – since producing states often lacked the domestic financial infrastructure to absorb such surpluses. Some of this money was converted into cultural capital; in Nigeria it funded the construction of the National Theatre which hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, and in Iran it allowed the building of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and the acquisition of a rich collection of Western modern art. Here, the art of Alexander Calder – an artist whose work was heavily funded by Standard Oil’s Rockefeller family – which hangs in the museum and was also commissioned for the Aula Magna hall in Caracas, becomes the conjuncture where the slippery histories of oil, capital, and empire merge in the seeming neutrality of abstraction. These are the rare scenes in the film that are not made up of archival images, which places these histories in the present.
An Incomplete Calendar leaves out many events relating to OPEC’s history: the 1975 siege on its headquarters in Vienna which called for the liberation of Palestine, how petrodollars have funded the rise of gulf autocracies, and oil’s rapid destruction of our present and future. Sohrabi’s approach is not a reconstructive historiography, rather the aim is to look at how oil’s promise of economic emancipation proved to be inseparable from a continued colonial flow of raw material and capital between the North and the South. No reminder is needed that such modalities of extractivism find their like in our present.
Rebecka Öhrström Kann runs the newsletter Seeing Further, a listing for self-organised film in London. She is also a Research Assistant at Tate and an incoming PhD student in History of Art at the University of Oxford.
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