Anthropocene Desire Lines: A Coal Story

In this experimental visual essay, we follow an imaginary lump of coal across space and time from its Gondwanan beginnings, through its extraction from the Talcher Coalfields in Odisha in India, combustion in a thermal power plant in Ennore in Tamil Nadu, and into the future through its multitude of postcombustion afterlives. We do so through the figure of ‘anthropocene desire lines’, which draws on Karen Coelho’s idea of ‘water lines’ (Coelho 2022) and Gabrielle Hecht’s idea of ‘residual governance’ (Hecht 2023), to track how flows of earthly matter that begin in subterranean strata, and, mobilized by ideas of power, growth and national pride, result in indifference towards the molecular colonization of bodies, soils, waters and airs they produce (Mendes 2017). The essay compresses the deep, everyday and future times of coal and its geologic, territorial, microscopic and planetary scales into a single textual/visual narrative. In this way, it draws out simultaneities across time and interconnections across space, as a way of developing a relational Anthropocene imaginary.