Devadeep Gupta
Coal Queen: The Jet Black Hill (2024)
quadraphonic sound composition with video
duration: ca. 10’
Sound Design: Abhijit Chetia
Assamese Verse: Devajit Moran
Italian Voice: Paolo Cugusi
Transcreation of Protest Verses from Assamese to English: Jessica Jakoinao
“Letter to Paolo” translated from Italian by Nicola Guastamacchia
Research Assistant: Avinash Das
Recording Assistant: Rajkumar Rahul Dihingia
Coal Queen: The Jet Black Hill explores the intersectional spaces between a rainforest, a village, and the rampant illegal coal-mining operations around Margherita’s Dihing-Patkai Rainforests and Wildlife Sanctuary. In 1860, Italian engineer Roberto Paganini was invited to Assam by the British East India Company to construct collieries and rail lines. After six years of working there, he rechristened the indigenous hamlet of Ma’kum as Margherita to honour the queen of Italy, Margherita of Savoy.
Since Paganini’s interventions in the late 1800s, the ecological equilibrium of this once lush region has deteriorated into an environmental and public health nightmare. At present, the landscape is ridden with illicit rat-hole mines, unchecked acid-mine drainage, and unregulated incineration of waste. The coal mafia and syndicate control most of the region’s resources and infrastructures, enabled and aided by the State government’s avarice, apathy, and neglect.
Having grown up witnessing the degeneration of Margherita’s terrain, environmental activist and rap artist Devajit Moran responds to a letter written by Paganini to his son in Rome about his work and stay in Ma’kum. Local resilience in the present addresses the colonial extractive enterprise from the past, demanding historical accountability for a biome whose devastation continues under the gaze of a morally corrupt capitalistic endeavour. Blending institutional archival narratives, ecological urgencies, sounds and acts of protest, and the intricacies of the interplay between people and their land, the installation focuses on collective reparative tools to counter a generational crisis.