Hambach (eviction) 6.527

Original painting, included in my solo exhibition Slow Creep at Project 78 Gallery.

Acrylic ink and gouache on board
600 x 730mm
2024

In the spring of 2024, I plotted a line of latitude (50.8518) through Project 78 Gallery on the south coast of England and followed it eastward online, creating a route
for a hypothetical circumnavigation—a virtual journey that would yield the imagery from which to make an exhibition. The impossible tour crossed 19 countries and two oceans—traversing cities, agricultural land, wilderness, mountains and lakes while locating multiple sites of cultural production, extractivism, protest, conflict, dispossession, extraterrestrial exploration, leisure and recreation.

Read more at https://jamieatherton.com/slow-creep/

In 1978, RWE, a German multinational energy company, purchased Hambacher Forst, a 12,000-year-old forest just west of Cologne. 90% of the forest has since been cleared to make way for the Tagebau Hambach, one of the largest open pit lignite mines in Europe with a maximum depth reaching almost 300m below sea level.

Lignite, also known as brown coal, is the most polluting of all coal types and among the most harmful to human health. It is, however, relatively cheap to extract and was seen by Germany, the world’s largest producer, as key to achieving energy independence. The coal is extracted using bucket-wheel excavators, including the 93m tall, 225m long Bagger 293 which, at 14,200 tonnes, is the heaviest land-based vehicle ever built.

The last remnants of the forest, including an area that sits a short distance north of the line, is rich in biodiversity and home to 142 species regarded as important for conservation, including a population of rare Bechstein’s bat, the survival of which is severely threatened by planned future expansion of the mine. Efforts to protect what remains of a once widespread sylvan ecosystem have resulted in numerous large-scale protests and occupations.

On the 13 September 2018, the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Construction sent hundreds of police officers into an occupied area of woodland to evict protestors and remove the elaborate treehouse village they’d built there over the previous six years. On the 19th of that month, journalist Steffen Meyn, who’d been working on a documentary about the site, fell from a walkway and died. According to the Academy of Arts for Media Cologne, Meyn’s alma mater, the last two recordings on his memory card had been deleted before the camera was released by the Aachen Public Prosecutor's Office.

Evictions were briefly halted before resuming on the 23rd. By the beginning of October, all 86 treehouses had been destroyed. Three years later a court ruled that the eviction had been carried out under a false pretext and was therefore illegal.

In 2023 the German government received EU approval for a €2.6 billion compensation payment to RWE to phase out lignite mining in the Rhine region. This is scheduled to reach completion by 2038 with mines such as Hambach slated to to be transformed into wildlife sanctuaries. Much of Hambach will become a lake, a process
that will take at least a century due to its size. On its website RWE describes these reclamation projects as creating ‘a paradise for threatened species of plants and animals, some of which had already been declared extinct.’