Loop Barcelona
Galeria Francisco Fino is pleased to participate in this year's edition of Loop Barcelona, with Karlos Gil's The Centre Cannot Hold (2026). Request preview
A journey through the geological and cosmic deep time of oil, The Centre Cannot Hold is a captivating cinematographic journey whereby the planet is a surface relentlessly perforated for the extraction of fossil fuels. The film travels to different locations defined by extractivism: from Los Angeles to the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait to Oman, it transports us to otherworldly landscapes where geopolitical power is accumulated, concocted, and enacted. A hybrid between theoretical treatise, a documentary, a sci-fi film, geopolitical demonology, and esoteric archeology, The Centre Cannot Hold is a meditation on the necrological worlding of modernity: extracting dead organic matter to transform it into an energetic and material commodity whilst bringing about the destruction of ecosystems, displacement of indigenous peoples, privatisation of natural resources, illness-bearing pollution, and rising planetary temperatures.
Despite the millions of years that it took for oil and gas to form, and in spite of the negative ecological consequences, they are being extracted at breakneck speed to power economic growth and double down on a fossil fuel economy. This tension between deep time and acceleration defines a relationship with the planet based on non- reciprocal, damning, and megalomaniac enactments of dispossession, depletion, accumulation, and degradation. Fossil fuels exemplify a relationship with the Earth that succeeds centuries of privatisation of natural resources, subjugation of both human and nonhuman life, and never-ending new frontiers of wealth production.
Oil is the narrator of planetary ecological breakdown. It lubricates the flow of power whilst decaying every thing it materially constitutes. Oil, in its manifold transformations and applications — fuel, military technology, clothing, pharmaceuticals, plastics, fertilisers, cosmetics, asphalt, solar panels, and so on — permeates in every nook and cranny of our sense of the world, the self, and collectivity. Fluid, opaque, and flammable: both shell and flesh of our materials and metaphors, oil is the substrate of capitalism’s own ecology of degradation and death.
The Centre Cannot Hold is a telluric meditation on what Reza Negarestani — whose book Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials (2008) has greatly inspired the film — calls ungrounding: the process of degenerating a solid body — the Earth — by corrupting the coherency of its surfaces — oil drilling. From the esotericism of the desert to the constant puncture of the surface of Los Angeles; from the towering oil- fuelled skyscrapers of Abu Dhabi to the eclipsed sun over the Mauritanian desert, oil strings planetary narrations of collapse. Crude, slippery, and acrid: oil is the nonhuman enabler of the Anthropocene.