Empire of Blight (I–IV) - David LaRiviere

“What legacies will we leave behind, not only for the generations that succeed us but also for the epochs and species that will come after ours? Are we being good ancestors?”— Robert Macfarlane, Underland, p. 410

The Empire of Blight photo collage series brings my Anti-Tourism methodology to the Athabasca Tar Sands, focusing specifically on Bitumount, the abandoned industrial plant where Canada’s first experimental oil sands extraction was attempted. The work examines how a century of extraction has produced not only a devastated landscape, but an aesthetic and affective atmosphere of contradiction: ordinary and monstrous, banal and catastrophic. Rather than argue about the Tar Sands, the project renders these contradictions felt, approaching petro-modernity through sensation, dissonance, and encounter.Developed from fieldwork conducted over three trips (2015, 2024, 2025), the project draws on first-hand research at abandoned sites, tailings ponds, and a landscape where industrial origins and ecological precarity remain entangled.

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Empire of Blight I
The Bitumount power plant, built by Robert Fitzsimmons circa 1925, anchors the frame while above it unfolds a vast expanse of strip-mining, photographed from a Cessna aircraft. Unlike Magritte's collision of day and night, the juxtaposition at play marks a temporal rift encompassing a century of speculation in Northern Alberta, and a disjuncture between the haunting of early development and the sheer magnitude of operations that characterize the late-capitalist era.

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Empire of Blight II
A dense canopy of present-day pipelines, stacks, and conduits, proliferating through the Suncor base camp, is inverted over top a rusted section of Bitumount’s industrial ruins.

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Empire of Blight III
The Athabasca River is seen just beyond the platform at Bitumount; while a toxic tailings pond, with various robo-hawk mounted on floating platforms, occupy the sky. Rivers and tailings.

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Empire of Blight IV
Again the Athabasca river and Bitumount form the lower register, but the sky is replaced by yet another tailings pond, one populated by orange-jumpsuited “bitu-men” scarecrows.