Globalisation promises that all will be wonderful…but people know now it is an unfair process and they are affected by it…if you dig out a village, nothing can ever be built on it again…it all disappears…a mining company comes from outside…digs into the earth, takes whatever is precious, makes money from it…
however, we are the ones who disappear…

(Daniel, student, Cottbus, Eastern Germany, September 2006)

The NiederLausitz lies in the southeastern part of the State of Brandenburg in the former East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) where it meets the Polish border. Of Sorb origin (Slavic language group), the region has been shaped by the timeline of industrialisation and was defined as a Model State of the DDR. As part of the largest opencast mining territory in Europe, the Tagebau, now owned by a global multinational corporation, lies north, east and south of the provincial capital, Cottbus, in the heart of the region, and continues to be extended, leading to epic scale destruction of the surrounding landscape while the braunkohle (lignite) is forecast to be depleted by 2030¹.

Having first visited the region in the Autumn of 2003 in search of the impact of global capital in a periphery of Europe, as had been experienced in my native Ireland, I quickly realised that it was in fact the antithesis of this experience. Instead, I encountered an emptying and the recognition that the same globalising forces which were transforming unrestrained the landscape of my birth, were indeed changing this landscape, prophetically, through its forces of withdrawal and seepage – a process of globalised haemorrhaging – jobs going further East and its younger population migrating to the more prosperous West. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, much of the former East, defined as one of the first neoliberalised states in the world², has been economically devastated. In 2007, the region came last in a government-funded national survey addressing regional future prospects, entitled the Zukunftsatlas (Atlas of the Future). The former East Germany, at the heart of the expanded European Union, has been struggling to determine a future in a globalised context.

Building on the thematics of my previous projects and incorporating digital video self-portraits, photography, cross-generational testimony and artefactual material, Ausschnitte aus EDEN/Extracts from EDEN³ has been constructed in the context of a landscape shaped by and inscribed with the utopic ideological aspirations of modernity – Industrialisation, Socialism and now, Globalisation. In the aftermath of the global economic collapse of 2007/2008, I would assert that the prophetic experiences of this region prior to this event, held and holds significant and important insight because of its socio-economic experience as a result of the functioning of neoliberal globalisation, for citizens and communities not only locally but, globally. Therefore, and pivotal to the project is the catalyst for the region, the Tagebau and critically seeing it as an allegory for neoliberalised late capital – finite, fragile and ultimately, unsustainable.

1 Under current German government proposals, to meet the global climate emergency, the tagebau and powerplant is to close by 2038.

2 Lawrence McFall, Eastern Germany Transformed: From Postcommunist to Late Capitalist Political Culture. German Politics and Society 17/2 (1999), pp. 1-24

3 Supported by Visual Arts Bursary/Arts Council of Ireland