Patos-Marinza is one of Europe’s largest on-shore oilfields consisting of vast agricultural land on which
resident’s farmlands had to make way for oil drillers. After the fall of communism in the early 90s,
markets were liberalized with little legal frameworks resulting in the present ownership of the resources
by Bankers Petroleum, a fully owned subsidiary of Geo-Jade Petroleum (China). What remained is a
frozen conflict between impoverished farmers including their communities on one side and a giant
company sitting on nearly 200 hectares of fossil fuels on the other.

In 2004, the Canadian company Bankers Petroleum took over the oil fields of Patos Marinza from the
state-owned company Albpetrol. Half a decade ealier after having financed a controversial energy
project in the nearby region, the World Bank together with the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (EBRD) decided for the joint finance support of Bankers. In total, financial facilities
comprised a sum of 230$ million including a five million dollars environmental remediation loan. While
Bankers invested a bit to renew its technical inventory and cleaned-up some of the heavily contaminated
areas, most of the 10, 000 affected residents in immediate proximity of the oil wells did not benefit at
all. Local communities still experience unemployment, toxic waste and increased air pollution,
regardless of the explicit development mandate of the financial institutions and Bankers’ effort through
social investments. Bankers’ Agricultural Support Initiative, for example, has been perceived as illadvised by local communities due to an overall lack of participatory decision-makin

In particular, the framing and set-up of so-called social investments under the veil of corporate social
responsibility presumed a prevalent lack of capacity by local communities that were characterized as
materially disadvantaged. Drawing on this narrative, their lack of recognition mounted in the exclusion
of their voices to be valued as legitimate in decision-making processes. Further injustices of structural
exclusion against local communities became apparent as formal complaints at the World Bank or the
repeated demand for meetings with Bankers were denied. Among other environmental hazards, residents
were complaining about increased seismic activity caused by oil drilling. Clearly, local residents in the
region were left alone with the uneven burden of environmental change without being able to engage in
decision-making beforehand. The economic activity in the area is high due to the oil business, but
residents are not even compensated with increased opportunities for employment.

In this, the privatization of Albania’s oil sector did not contribute to improved environmental safeguard
policies and technocratic planning disregarded the historical diversity of livelihoods along human-nature
interdependencies. The present photographic series attempts to visualize the fragile coexistence of local
communities torn between economic needs and environmental burdens. Thus, light is shed on emergent
socio-political challenges. It also depicts a highly contested fossilscape where pollution, uncontrolled
dumpsites and contamination of water resources go hand in hand with asymmetric power relations of
access to natural resources.

Bio
Dennis Schüpf is a documentary photographer and environmental justice researcher concerned with the
attempt to visualize socio-natures, revealing power relations that form contested land- and seascapes. In
his pictures, these spaces appear to be deeply inscribed in the identities of people struggling for their
livelihoods in the face of natural resource exploitation. He has a degree in International Development
Studies (M.A) and is a PhD candidate at IDOS (German Institute for Development & Sustainability)
studying the implications of coastal sand extraction in the context of climate change adaptation.