Oil giant Chevron has admitted removing an art installation from a fence surrounding its refinery in Richmond, California, near San Francisco.
The piece, installed on Earth Day (April 22), consisted of brightly painted slats placed on the fence around the oil refinery. Neighborhood residents were invited to inscribe messages and stories on the slats to document the health and environmental impacts of the local oil industry and form “a collective monument to resistance.” The slats were painted with messages such as “clean energy now”.
“Our fencing and other company facilities are working equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction,” Chevron spokesman Ross Allen told Artnet News in an email.
The organizers of the art project claim that the parts of the fence they used belong to the city and that they received permission from the Richmond Public Arts and Culture Commission, the Love Your Block program and the City of Richmond and Contra Costa County Public Works Department. Richmond Municipal Advisory Committee to install the work. The kidnapping, they said, was “an attempt to silence our voices and erase our stories”.
The work has been the subject of an exhibition at the Richmond Art Center which ran from April 5 to June 3.
Chevron says the fence is the company’s private property. “Maybe someone is wrong about who owns our fence and our property line, but we are absolutely clear who owns the area,” spokesperson Ross Allen told Artnet News. “[N]o The city permit authorizes construction on private property without the permission of the landowner.
Earth Justice, an environmental law nonprofit, wrote on its website that the Chevron refinery “has been wreaking havoc on the local community for decades and was the single largest emitter of greenhouse gases. of State”. Residents of the surrounding neighborhood, the organization points out, are mostly people of color.
“The population closest to the refinery has disproportionately high rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer,” THE Guardian reported in 2019. City children have asthma rates twice the national average, the newspaper reported in an article about a 2018 lawsuit the city filed against Chevron, alleging public nuisance and negligence.
“We think it’s quite bizarre that they disappeared from the project without any kind of communication with us,” said one of the facility’s organizers, Graham Laird Prentice. San Francisco Chronicle, noting that there had been a lot of publicity surrounding the project. The move “seems to have happened overnight. It’s a pretty dodgy thing.
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