Energy and Landscape RepairOpening the Archive of the LandYee Shuang Sim, Dara Rüfenacht, and Shriya Chaudhry

Since the 19th century brown coal has fuelled the economy in the Rheinische Revier. The rise of RWE as the only energy producer in the region concentrated significant control over land in the hands of a single company. As a result, the massive excavation in the large scale open pit mines rapidly erased the palimpsest of the cultural landscape that had been developed over thousands of years.

To mitigate the loss and erasure brown coal mining has caused on the land, RWE has been resettling people, recultivating agricultural land, and planting new forests. Additionally, their future plans include utopian lake projects. The goal of this recultivation effort is to eliminate the signs of the mining activity from the post-mining landscape.

Natural and anthropogenic processes continuously shape the land. The various layers of this palimpsest create an archive, in which we can read both the past and the present. By archiving people’s memories of the land, we can preserve the things that were lost, through mining and recultivation, and make them accessible for future generations.