Filmed over a decade, from 2016 to 2026, this experimental audiovisual essay traces the transformation of the Cottbus-Nord lignite mine into the Cottbuser Ostsee. In the Lusatian region of eastern Germany, where coal extraction has reshaped landscapes, displaced settlements, and shaped generations of life, the emerging lake embodies a profound contradiction. Vast waters fill the excavated terrain, dead trees pierce the surface, and abandoned industrial buildings bear witness to a world built around coal. As the scars of extraction give way to the promise of a picturesque lake, its beauty risks obscuring the violence of this transformation. Passages from Lukas Rietzschel’s Sanditz resonate with the histories of displacement, belonging, and fractured futures that mark post-socialist eastern Germany, recalling the communities and places mining sacrificed.
As a multimodal anthropologist approaching the landscape, I engage with land use and extractivism as material, historical, and embodied processes. Filming and editing become ways for me to dialogue with the surroundings, attending to their traces, absences, and unresolved tensions. I select stock music in response to the footage and sensations I experience while filming, which then shapes the rhythm and montage of my work. Image, sound, and text form my experimental inquiry into a region caught between industrial inheritance and ecological reinvention, and between the promises of structural transformation and the persistence of loss. I ask myself what it means to call a landscape restored when its apparent renewal relies on erasing places, histories, and lives.
Text excerpts from the novel “Sanditz” by Lukas Rietzschel, Read by Stefan Rink & Anne S. Chahine, Music by Hasith nimantha from Pixabay, Song: Lost signal, Sound effect by Darina Evstafeva from Pixabay, Camera and video editing by Anne S. Chahine, Sound mixing by Stefan Rink, Footage shot at the Cottbuser Ostsee between 2016-2026, © Anne S. Chahine 2026
