For years, Tanja Engelberts has been searching for oil in Europe. Where was it extracted, what happened to the first oil fields, and do we still produce oil today?

Her research brought her to Merkwiller-Pechelbronn in northeastern France. Oil was drawn from surface springs in the forest here as early as the 15th century, but only in the 19th did it grow into a large-scale industry and a center of experimentation: the first pumpjacks appeared here, and the oil barrel as a measure was developed here too. Pechelbronn is regarded as the birthplace of the European oil industry.

Production peaked in the 1930s, but by the 1960s the wells were exhausted and the refineries and railway lines dismantled. Now, more than sixty years later, oil is welling up inthe forest again — dark pools, hidden like a local secret, that evoke the pioneers and mark the symbolic starting point of this project.

That hidden source became Engelberts' point of connection to this history. The large panoramic landscape Black Well forms the heart of the exhibition, printed in Van Dyke brown — a 19th-century process that breathes the atmosphere of the pioneer era — combined with contemporary possibilities. Working with Kees Brandenburg, a specialist in historical printing, she sought a techniquethat would give the place a spiritual charge: monumental in scale, free of the traditional glass negative, and able to embrace the viewer.

In Black well, White gold, these panoramic landscapes meet coloured night shots of a lithium mine operating in the same area today. Blurred and out of focus, they carry the promise of a new future — one in which the landscape must once again surrender its riches.

Gold, 2026, Digital print on high-gloss paper
Mounted on MFD with acrylic
80 x 60 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

Tar, 2026, Van Dyke Brown print on Hahnemühle Platinum Rag Framed with museum glass
80 x 120 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP

Black Well (I), 2026 Triptych, panorama
Van Dyke Brown print on Hahnemühle Platinum Rag
Framed with museum glass
106 x 140 cm (each) / 106 x 446 cm (total size triptych)
Unique

Tower, 2026, Digital print on high-gloss paper
Mounted on MFD with acrylic
26,5 x 18 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

White gold, 2026, Digital print on high-gloss paper
Mounted on MFD with acrylic
26,5 x 40 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

Black well (II), 2026, Panorama
Van Dyke Brown print on Hahnemühle Platinum Rag
Framed with museum glass
26 x 92 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP

Pitt, 2026, Van Dyke Brown print on Hahnemühle Platinum RagFramed with museum glass
53 x 76 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP