Oil and Moss
Antonina Tevlina and her parents live in the West Siberian village of Russkinskaya, near Surgut. They are Khanty, an indigenous nomadic people. Antonina and her family roam their ancestral territory of about 600 hectares with reindeer to provide for a living. For a number of years their existence has been threatened by the advancing oil industry. Leaking pipelines, pollution of rivers and lakes and the destruction of the ecosystem have led to a drastic reduction in the number of reindeers.
About 50% of Russian oil production comes from the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, the district where the Khanty live. The licenses that are issued often extend across their territory. Local oil workers make jokes about the district, which is seen as one large oil extraction area. It is estimated that about 1.5 million tonnes of oil end up in the Russian environment every year, twice as much as during the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
For his ‘Oil and Moss’ series, shot on 35 mm film, Igor Tereshkov used liquid from oil spills to develop his film. Oil randomly destroys the gelatin in the film and distorts the image with holes and scratches, as a metaphor for the destruction of the Khanty territory and the for reindeer indispensable Yagel moss, caused by the oil pollution.
