Author Description

From behind a fence on a forested hill, a solitary traveller contemplates the overwhelming scenery looming up from the depths. What the traveller can see through the sallow thorn bush at the southern rim of an excavation pit is a negative site, a deep void drawn only by the contours of volume and mass? an excavated plane composed of horizontal layers in shades of grey and ochre, each having different variations of hardness. A stepped wall leads down to a haul road, which is occupied by heavy machinery and trucks. It is strictly forbidden to enter this site without supervision. The traveller is Karen Vermeren. She is looking at the fully operational opencast mine in Rüdersdorf, east of Berlin, where limestone is removed from the quarry for commercial use in the production of building materials. A tourist leaflet describes the rugged white lime landscape of the quarry as a 'geo-highlight', offering its visitors a geological window into time.(i) And indeed, many amateur collectors and palaeontologists visit the site in search of genuine fossils, recovering from under the earth's crust a specimen from a far-distant geological past tracing 247.2 million years back. But the quarry is also a gaping wound 100 metres deep, one that will be exhausted by 2062, according to recent calculations." (from the text by Elke Couchez).