The Geisel Valley south of Halle is now a lake landscape created by the flooding of several redundant open-cast mining holes. The lignite of the Geisel Valley was located close to the surface. This meant that comparatively little overburden had to be moved, which favored the almost complete decarburization of the deposit by 1993. In the GDR, the term “Umkohlung” was used when villages were dredged and people resettled to make way for open-pit lignite mining. In his first DEFA documentary Umkohlung, made in 1965, Thomas Kuschel gives a voice to those affected and paints an extraordinarily critical picture of the consequences of a fossil fuel energy policy that continues to destroy nature and culture today. The program Schnitt ins Land [Cut into the Land] links Kuschel’s film with the portrait of rural working and family conditions in current films by Marian Mayland and Alexandra Tatar. Mayland explores the extent to which the 1980s brought about end-of-life feelings on both a personal and societal level in a conversation with her parents and brother, set in the domestic surroundings of the former, badly running market garden of her parents in a small West German town next to a military training ground. The monotony of industrialized landscapes is not only the result of evisceration but also of large-scale agricultural use, the profitability of which is often achieved on the backs of precariously paid harvest workers from Eastern Europe. The Romanian artist Alexandra Tatar exposed herself to this experience together with her mother in an Austrian wine-growing region: Mâna care taie [Cutting Hand] testifies to the deep imbalance of European integration.
Followed by an audience discussion with Marian Mayland and Alexandra Tatar, moderated by Florian Wüst.