Notes from the Demolition Edge
Abstract
These notes gather the scenes of a single day around a coal mine. In the hinterlands of western Germany, thousands of protesters rallied in January 2023 to convey their opposition to the extension of the mine and etched the name of a village – Lützerath – into the collective memory of climate protests. These notes linger in the very moment of the village’s passing and give way to the bewilderment of a peripatetic fieldworker thrown into the turmoil that flared up when the law arrived to disband what was left of a multi-year occupation, until its last devotees – two people barricaded in a self-dug tunnel – would have been dragged off. These notes are fragments on the conundrums of engaging with underground phenomena, on the fallibility of ideas of representation, and on the fragility of writing about conflicts over coal, climate, and communities.
Submitted: March 24, 2025 | Accepted: May 13, 2025 | Published July 21, 2025 | Language: en
Keywords Diffraction • Coal • Lützerath • Climate activism • Imaginary fieldwork
Copyright © 2025 Kris Decker. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/LGSP/2785-2709/2025/01/001