Unraveling Industry: Follow the Oil
http://followtheoil.org
2019-2022
Unravelling Industry is a platform to map oil and gas infrastructure in Louisiana by
company. Through Follow the Oil, an interactive “scrolly-telling” narrative, the public can follow the flow of oil from points of extraction (wells and access canals) to points of emission (plants and refineries) through the narrative device of a single pipeline.
The project was designed to support local and global demands for corporate
accountability, make a case for oil extraction to be considered unjust enrichment, and look toward a horizon for “ecological reparations” that would support reintegration –– for segregated human communities and between human beings and our wider ecologies.
![]()
Beyond the platform, the project will manifest in various creative outcomes to explore the corporate-colonial cosmologies that our extractive culture follows to the end(s) of the earth. It traces corporate-colonial guiding lines through the continuum of Extractivism, which spans from colonialism and slavery to coastal erosion and climate change. Uses a methodology I call cartographic unraveling, it disentangles and analyzes the GIS lines (pipelines and canals) and points (wells) used to make geography, unmake communities, and break Earth’s geology.

