The Future Was Extracted Here

The Future Was Extracted Here is a black-and-white series set in the lignite landscapes around Leipzig, where coal shaped not only the ground but also everyday life, local identity and the social imagination of security. The sequence approaches this territory as a lived cycle: coal once appeared warming, protective and foundational, yet it also produced dependency, environmental damage and forms of risk whose consequences extend beyond the sites of extraction themselves. The series opens with a fern, an image of deep time and vegetal origin. It points back to the Carboniferous world from which coal emerged, linking present-day energy systems to ancient biological matter. From there, the sequence moves into the industrial and urban sphere: smoking plants, engineered structures and settled neighbourhoods suggest both the material infrastructure of extraction and the domestic worlds sustained by it. Coal is not shown simply as a resource; it appears as a condition that entered houses, habits and collective memory. At the same time, the work remains attentive to ambivalence. Industrial forms can appear monumental, protective or even strangely beautiful, while the surrounding settlement hints at the benefits long associated with extractive economies. Yet these images are countered by signs of instability and aftermath: scorched or damaged trees evoke heat stress and ecological fragility; dark inversions and heavy tonal contrasts unsettle the apparent solidity of the built world. The transition away from coal appears as necessary, but not resolved. Wind turbines emerge in fog, their outlines present yet uncertain. They stand for an energy transition whose direction is visible in principle, but whose social and material future remains indistinct. The series therefore avoids a simple narrative of replacement. One system is passing, another is arriving, and between them lies a zone of ambiguity. The final image serves as a coda: bicycles at the edge of a post-mining lake, a narrow opening in the vegetation, a path that seems both accidental and inviting. The landscape is no longer intact, but neither is it closed. The title, The Future Was Extracted Here, names this tension directly: the region’s future was long fuelled by what was taken from the ground, and its next future must now be imagined on altered terrain.