Zone Rouge (Red Zone), France

The Zone Rouge (Red Zone), in northeastern France, was the site of intense fighting and shelling during World War I. After the conclusion of the war, nine villages in the area were deemed uninhabitable because of unexploded ordnance. (Farmers periodically recover these shells, which they refer to as the “iron harvest.”) In the ensuing decades, the French government planted rows of Norway spruces on the war-ravaged landscape, eventually leading to an infestation of European bark beetles in the summers of 2018 and 2019. Between the Lines (2024–25), a multiyear project by Marjolijn Dijkman (b. 1978, Groningen), addresses the succession of calamities that have befallen the Zone Rouge, focusing on the area’s “ongoing struggle to deal with the aftermath of and physical remnants from [WWI] in the context of the global climate crisis” (Dijkman 2025, 193).

C.S.H.