Precious Volatile Stones and Other Stories, MP4 6´35´´. Author Proof 2/3, Hugo Pamar, 2025.

I work with archival footage originally produced by transnational corporations such as Royal Dutch Shell and Creole Petroleum Corporation to promote Venezuela’s oil industry and attract foreign workers between the 1950s and 1970s. Venezuela’s modern history is deeply intertwined with the extraction of oil—a profoundly paradoxical resource. I am interested in revisiting the cultural imaginary produced by the audiovisual units from these oil companies, and in examining their role in the construction of national identity. Through audiovisual quotation and appropriation, the work engages historiographic questions while challenging conventional notions of authorship. Here, appropriation functions as a form of citation—an activation of the past and the collective unconscious that continues to demand our attention through its persistent, ever-present barbarism.