Mapping coal is an on-going project that looks at ecological conflicts through the perspective of the Capitalocene era. Pursuing a narrative of appropriation of natural resources and externalization of ecological impacts, the project locates coal as the core element of conflict driven by developments taking place in northern Colombia and the United Kingdom.

Through focusing on the historical value of this cheap resource, and by creatively engaging with current networks and infrastructure of coal mining and energy use, the project explores natural depletion -or extractivism, colonial capitalist enterprises, trade routes, and other issues relating to the continuous extraction and use of this polluting combustible.

By tracing the violence embedded in industrial processes from opencast coal mining in South America to fossil combustion for power generation in Europe, Mapping coal proposes a narrative between the extraction/deposition binary, also questioning the geopolitics of the centre/periphery debate, which unfolds amid a global context that aims to converge efforts to accelerate the urgent transition to a post-carbon society.

Mapping coal comprises photographs, texts, maps and archival material.

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