Daniel Mebarek (b. 1993, Bolivian/Algerian) is an artist working with photography and video. His projects emerge from long-term fieldwork and close engagement with specific communities and sites. His work looks at identity, urbanization, labor, and memory, while critically reflecting on the power dynamics that shape documentary practice and the act of making images.

He was selected as a Foam Talent for 2026–2027 and was a finalist for the Discovery Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2025. He has received support from the Centre national des arts plastiques (France), PhMuseum (Italy), and Photolucida (United States). His work has been published in The British Journal of Photography (UK), Aperture (US), and Camera Austria (Austria), among others. His work is held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).

For the first half of the 20th century, Bergwitz was a mining town centered on the exploitation of lignite also known as “brown coal”. Then, in 1955, the town’s open-pit mine was closed and flooded with water to become the Bergwitzsee (Lake Bergwitz). This shift in the landscape inaugurated a slow process of renaturation in the area, which had for decades been affected by the mining pollution. Today, most of the other towns in the region have also transitioned into post-mining landscapes, having turned their open-pit mines into artificial lakes. It is expected that all coal mining activities will stop across the German territory by 2038.

During the residency period, I decided to work through different approaches, combining photographs, cyanotypes and archival images that I collected, to provide a snapshot of the history and present of Bergwitz. What was once a place of heavy labor had now become a space for leisure and recreation marked by a feeling of languor.

The archival images were reproduced from the collection of Herbet Hoch, the town’s archivist, and from the private archive of Armin Weiß.