Daniel Chatard Project II

The project „No Man‘s Land“ deals with the conflict over the extraction of lignite in the Rhenish mining area, where the energy company RWE operates the open-cast mines Hambach, Garzweiler and Inden. Together they are the largest source of CO2 emissions in the whole of Europe. For the expansion of the mines, fields had to give way, forests were cut down and entire villages destroyed and resettled. But since 2012, resistance has been forming in the environmental movement, which uses methods of civil disobedience against the industry and occupies the Hambach Forest, which was planned to be cut. The conflict culminated in the eviction of the forest in 2018. As the remainings of the forest were then presumably saved by environmentalists‘ efforts, inhabitants of the last villages, which are in the process of resettlement, gained hope they could stay, too. This conflict over space is used in the project to examine the current struggle in Germany between environmental and economic interests and to document the beginning of the end of the coal age in Germany.