Coal After Audre is a video meditation reflects on Lorde’s poem Coal from her 1968 First Cities collection and Alexis Pauline Gumbs' quote from her 2020 book Dub: Finding Ceremony, which asks “How do you write a poem about coal?”

The narrative reflects on the extraction of minerals from the earth to the legacies of the extraction of black people from Africa. Lorde’s Coal takes the metaphor of coal as black fuel that has supported the development of our modern world. For Lorde Coal creates and expresses the words being spoken “from the earth’s inside”. Coal After Audre takes this metaphor and reimagines coal as a much-maligned and rejected fuel, in a moment when words are difficult to find, yet somewhere within the ancient wisdom of coal; within its compressed matter of everyday life, there is light. The light that is attempting to make itself seen through the darkness.

Made during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, the film uses footage from walks in Cascais, Portugal, Rainham Marshes, Essex, Floyen Mountain, Norway and Brixton, London.

Coal After Audre was commissioned for the Acts 2020 Stanley Picker Public Lecture Programme which considers what it means to stage an online event as a way to distribute artistic knowledge.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/35216