coal

Remi Graves

Blackfriars Bridge, 1905. A Black Cherokee man is arrested and charged as a ‘wandering lunatic’. In the City of London asylum, he is photographed; looking directly at the camera, he insists and refuses. He dies in the asylum one year later.

In the absence of Paul Downing’s own account, Remi Graves writes from and into the trans archive, presenting a sequence of poems and experiments mapping resonances between selves across historical records. Through river crossings and library passes, chance meetings and visitations, coal is a document that interrogates what we do with the scattered fragments of a life.

‘Remi Graves’ coal performs a circuit between “seeing” and “knowing”, an experiment in saturation and narrative that is immensely moving. It “did something to me”, as Graves writes, evoking a book that's closed without the place being marked. One of my favourite pages is titled ‘Dream Vision of Cole and Paul meeting as musical score’. Below it is a drawing that emanates light touch and extemporary delight. Open the book and there it is, a page you did not expect to see. Here is Paul, who died on the summer solstice in 1906. Imagine the sun burning a hole through the paper. Look through the hole and there's Paul, living and dying in excess of the archive's capacity to behold the extent and possibility of Paul. Leave flowers on the ground. Write. Keep going until you reach it, the place where “times touch”, and a portal opens.’ – Bhanu Kapil