Coal: Nature Never Gives Up Without a Fight
This is a looped video segment from Exxon's Coal: A Bridge to the Future promotional video. The dialog repeated in the piece is as follows:
"Nature never gives up anything without a fight. It's a continuous fight and a challenge for a person to operate a piece of equipment and to take from nature things that she has put there for you to use."
This sentiment echoes the sense of self-entitlement that is commonly described by extractive industries. The confidence that resources were placed on the earth for "us" to use neglects and in most cases supersedes the notion that it may not be wise to extract the resources in the first place.
In installation this piece is projected as a 16mm film loop onto a large piece of coal. The projection bleeds around the coal leaving an outline of the film on the wall with a coal shaped void in the center.
Coal: Nature Never Gives Up Anything Without a Fight from Jeff Lovett on Vimeo.