The photographs in the book were made in the oil fields of the Niger Delta, Nigeria; the coal
belt of Jharkhand, India; and the open cast mines of Brandenburg and North Rhine Westphalia in Germany and Silesia in Poland. They shift between details and overviews,
landscapes and portraits, the familiar and the foreign, disorientating the viewer as to what
and where they are looking at. The images are cinematic—dark and brooding skies,
dramatic landscapes lit by gas flares, collapsing ruins of buildings. Deviating from straight
documentary, the book constructs new narratives of associative imagery to tell the story of
exploitation—both by international companies and by those living in the areas impacted by
their presence, in turn, hacking into the system.
‘Wahala translates the violence of these global mechanisms of fossil fuel extraction into
visibilities that help us grasp their complexity… Now we can understand: with the
exploitation of the planet we destroy ourselves.’ - Dr. Sophie Charlotte Opitz
