Niemandsland
In the German Rhineland, people's lives are marked by huge, slowly but steadily creeping holes that have already swallowed up fields, dozens of villages and entire forests. They are marked by their powerlessness in the face of an energy giant, which is rooted more deeply in the region than any tree in the resettlement sites. What does it feel like to look into these gaping holes and know: Somewhere there was my home?
The project "No Man's Land" looks at the conflict over the extraction of brown coal in the Rhineland, where the energy company RWE operates the opencast mines Hambach, Garzweiler and Inden. Together, they form the largest source of CO2 emissions in all of Europe. To enlarge the mines, fields had to give way, forests were cut down and entire villages destroyed and resettled. While Germany claims itself to be in a leading position in the transition towards renewables, the country is still heavily dependent on coal for energy production, with brown coal being the dirtiest source of energy available.
The conflict over space is documented to examine the current struggle in Germany between environmental, public and economic interests. It captures an era of the beginning of the end of coal within the transition of energy production in Germany.
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