ABOUT

I AM A PUMPJACK is about my first encounter with pumpjacks, the giant oil-extracting machines found widely across the United States. In the heat of August 2023, on the way to a bad freelance job, I drove past the hundreds of pumpjacks of the Lost Hills Oil Field in California. I had never seen a pumpjack before and I was shocked by their imposing, beast-like appearance.

Extracting oil while tipping up and down endlessly, together but in isolation, I felt both envy and pity for the pumpjacks. Envy because they looked so powerful, unwavering, and hardworking while extracting the oil that runs the world. They symbolize the machine-like efficiency and productivity that is deemed honorable under capitalism. I imagined myself becoming one of the pumpjacks, mimicking their gestures out in the field, thinking that if I was just more like them I would be fulfilled. I was promptly startled by my envy towards them: they are stuck in one place, locked in one motion, and made to extract the oil that harms the planet. Is that not an isolated, exhausting way to live?

Through I AM A PUMPJACK, I investigate pumpjacks as symbols of the capitalist ideal of being ever-producing, ever-extracting, and ever-stoic: perfect machines at the high cost of planetary destruction, exploitation, and isolation. Starting with a narration of my first encounter with the pumpjacks and ending with a dreamlike vision of the pumpjacks unhinging in a forest, I AM A PUMPJACK questions our cultural aspiration of hyper-productivity and hyper-extraction. Ultimately, it asks what it would look like for us and the pumpjacks to begin “unhinging” by breaking free of the instinct to constantly extract and produce.