S3E1 LITHIUM
Transcript
LK: Lutz Koepnick
GM: Guely Morató Loredo
VM: Víctor Mazón Gardoqui
JA: John Ayers
PAR: Pablo Ampuero-Ruiz
TH: Tori Hoover
JG: Jennifer Gutman
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INTRO
LK:
The camera glides slowly, very slowly across different fields of color. Grey, green, washed-out blue. A painter’s giant palette, you might think at first. Eventually the camera captures a field that’s starkly white. Blindingly white. So white, you want to close your eyes.
This is the strange, the toxic beauty of a lithium extraction site, as seen from a drone high up in the air. A Rothko of and for the 21st century. Meditative. Transcendent. Seemingly timeless. Somewhat extraterrestrial. Sublime, if you wish. And yet what the camera shows is the brutal effects of human mining onto natural environments, launched to serve the energy and mobility needs of the Global North. A few minutes into the film, a softly spoken voiceover details this impact on humans and natural environments alike.
Lithium is a critical ingredient of our renewable energy transition and future. It ensures the batteries of our mobile phones or electric vehicles serve their purpose: store what it takes to make us reach other places efficiently, without delay, physically, virtually. Free us from the burdens of place, the sluggishness of time. Optimize every minute of the day, at all times. But mining it comes at a cost.
The video is part of a multipronged, research-based art project that explores these costs and investigates different strategies of resilience and resistance. It has been created by Bolivian curator and artist Guely Morató Loredo. In today’s episode of Art of Interference we hear about her work and her collaboration with Spanish sound artist Víctor Mazón Gardoqui—their so-called wak’a project addressing the colonial legacy of silver and lithium extraction in Bolivia and its damaging impact on sacred sites and Indigenous communities. We’ll also hear about their ongoing project, Triangle of Sacrifice, which focuses on the extraction of lithium in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile and how this mining ravages geological deep time for the sake of the Global North’s need for speed. Both projects approach sound and listening as critical media of investigation, and both ask their collaborators and audiences not simply to listen more mindfully to their natural environments, but to listen with them, to recognize the voice and sentient nature of the nonhuman world.
PART ONE
LK:
Sixty percent of Earth’s reserves of lithium exist in a transnational triangle shared by Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. It is more than likely that our recording of this podcast episode, and your listening, critically depend on materials mined in this area, one of the most arid and remote regions of the globe.
It takes 2 million liters of water to produce 1 ton of lithium carbonate for battery manufacture. In this process, a few weeks of human activity transform thousands of years’ worth of deep geological time to serve our impatient present.
JA:
Lithium is useful in batteries because it’s, highly reactive. And willingly gives up an electron. It’s those electrons that we use to do work, like in pushing a car.
LK:
This is John Ayers, my colleague at Vanderbilt and a geochemist and professor in the Earth and Environmental Science Department.
JA:
Because it’s so reactive, it doesn’t occur in its elemental state in nature. It’s always, dissolved in water or absorbed onto clays or in minerals, we have to mine and concentrate it to get it into a usable form. In the lithium triangle the mining is from brines that they pump from underground. There’s still a lot of other elements in the brines and they’re present at much higher concentrations. So, you have to remove most of the dissolved material and get that trace lithium separated from everything else.
LK:
Even if it might not seem so at first blush, mining resources from the Earth can also be a water security issue.
JA:
Because brines are not usable. But pumping the brine out of the water can actually cause fresh water to get sucked into the ground to replace it. That’s a problem happening now. Also, when you process the brine, with these direct lithium extraction techniques requires fresh water. And so, these brines are basically found in arid environments where you already have very little water, and then you’re using up a lot of the water that’s available. So that’s why it’s a big problem.
LK:
Lithium extraction causes a lot of environmental damage. It mines geological time for the sake of making our electronics perform faster — to increase the reach of our EVs and extend the charge of your laptop. But the problems of lithium extraction are far larger than this. They perpetuate colonial histories that reach back to 16th century—the mining of silver from Potosí’s Cerro Rico and its related demolition of the sacred sites of Indigenous people in what is today Bolivia, called wak’as in the Quechua language.
In 2020, Bolivian artist and curator Guely Morato started the wak’a project, a multipronged, collaborative, and community-based project that centers the impact of silver and lithium extraction on the material and spiritual welfare of land and people.
GM:
The Incas believed that every presence had a soul, including land and animals. At first, the waka’s were considered sacred bodies with high energy power. The mountains, for example. The first one is Sumaj Orck’o, which is the original name of Cerro Rico. The Incas knew of the existence of silver, on the mountain, but it was only extracted for religious purpose. For example, temples or offering to the sun and moon. With the arrival of the Spanish, the wak’a became a mine. And extraction process began that generate great wealth to Europe. Very close in the same state they discovered the biggest resource of lithium in the world.
LK:
Guely here refers to the Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat and lithium reserve, less than a hundred miles West of Potosí. It’s 10,600 square kilometres (or 4,100 sq mi) in size, a giant silver mirror after infrequent rainfall, an otherworldly, unforgiving white expanse during most of the year. It’s also a hot-spot for tourists, who take all kinds of images playing with how this unique landscape collapses scale and depth perception. Between 2020 and 2023, Guely’s wak’a project explored the disturbing echoes between Spanish colonial silver excavation and proposed lithium projects around Uyuni. She and various collaborators carried out extended recording sessions in different mines and sites around the sacred site of Cerro Rico and then, with specialized audio equipment transduced these recordings into the salt flat, . . . as if to recuperate the silenced energies of the sacred. In the words of Guely’s principal collaborator, Victor Mazón:
VM:
We are creating new fictions, new narratives, creating some speculative environments.
Wonders of sound that you cannot touch But through technology, it can touch you.
LK:
Guely and Victor also shaped lithium salt bricks from the flat into site-specific sculptural objects and then turned these chards on salt into intricate recording devices. They then inserted microphones into the salt to capture the sound of wind without the friction imposed by existing mining equipment. Later, they played these sounds back to bodies of stones and quinoa near Potosí; nonhuman materials resonating across distance.
GM:
We started, for example, recording inside Cerro Rico and we make exercises to help the new mine to help, Salar de Uyuni to listen to the other w’aka. And we make exercise, for example, with transducers in the salt flat, putting all these records from one mine to the other mine. The idea was try to open this listening, with these two territories, not only in an anthropocenic way. We try to open the opportunity to listen in a, in a different way.
LK:
To listen in a different way: for Guely and her team, this statement includes the idea that nature itself does all kinds of listening, that rocks, minerals, and metals are far from numb and dumb objects. In the wak’a project, Moretó and Mazón also collaborated with various scientists, miners, anthropologists, historians, engineers, and artists to build an extensive VR environment trying to emulate the impact of silver and lithium mining onto the soundscapes of various wak’as. And last but not least, Morató cooperated with the Young Postosí Philharmonic Orchestra, asking musicians to imagine possible sounds for silent footage from the mines. These soundtracks use both instruments and various foley techniques to develop contrapuntal soundscapes to counteract the deafening noise of modern extractivism.
LK:
When I spoke to Guely and Victor, I was curious to hear more about what brought them to do this kind of work—and why sound and listening take on such an important role in all their projects.
GM:
I worked for a long time in cinema, so I realized how important is the image for our society. And at one point I start to thinking in a different way. So I decide to explore the image in other ways, in more multisensory way. So, I started inviting people around South America and from other latitudes and I decided to start this platform, this, experiment, which is Sonandes.
LK:
Its headquarters in La Paz, Bolivia, Sonandes serves as a platform to enable and disseminate sound and often community-based art practices in Latin America and beyond. Since its founding in 2014, Sonandes has supported various residency programs, labs, publications, and exhibits, all based on the understanding that art, the art of listening, plays an important role in knowing and transforming the world. Run by Guely Moreto for more than a decade, the organization’s most noted activity is the Sonandes Biennial International exhibition of Sound Art (2014-2024). This Biennal, Victor Mazon insists, was to be everything but
VM:
a cultural commodity, is different from a festival. It is different from a ticket entrance driving economy. We like to go to the location and to try to live in the location and spend time in the location with locals.
GM:
I was interested in public space how to involve more, more people in the processes. the subjects that I choose are not only about aesthetics. We start with different processes for, one decade. And then five years ago, six years ago, we start working outside of the cities in, territories like the desert or Amazonia, more complex situations.
LK:
The work Guely and Victor are doing is complex indeed. Often exhausting, involving many different contributors, not following the templates of the Western art world, even when some of it might be exhibited at events in the US, Germany, and Austria.
VM:
There was not a community about listening. There was no community about sound art. There was some sort of Western idea of experimental music. Highly academic, no. Maybe they were like highly trained musicians that they tried to make weird things, with instruments.
LK:
Their work engages with sound both as a medium of artistic research and as tool of communication. It struggles with all kinds of resistances, but it does so to create new communities and new structures of belonging.
GM:
It’s very important as music and as sound.
LK:
It’s aesthetic and political in nature, But it also has a spiritual dimension.
GM:
Our shamans, they are aware of the sound scape all the time. They are talking with animals, with the sky, with the rivers. in that sense, of course, the sound is an instrument for this cure.
LK:
Lithium today is a critical resource for batteries, keeping cell phones and electric vehicles running for ever-longer periods of time. But as Guely reminded me in our conversation, lithium also has a long history as a medication.
GM:
And talking about healing, I was thinking that lithium in small quantities is used to call psychotic episodes in bipolar patients, but in large quantities is used to calm entire societies. Maybe with this project, we realize that impact in our society, because we realize all these psychotic people asking for technology in a very desperate way, and all these enterprises dealing with all this lithium to calm this anxiety inside the societies.
LK:
Lithium’s different uses in history asks tough question about the relation of extraction and healing, of how we use and abuse technology and art to define our ideas of a good life. And how technology and violent histories of extraction often preclude us from asking such questions in the first place. How they dictate our needs rather than respond to them.
GM:
Maybe it’s not about the medication, maybe it’s about healing our bodies with other technologies.
INTERFERENCE 1
TH:
Can I just jump in for a second? This is our first episode of season three, and it’s been almost a year since we released the last one.
JG:
So, anything of note happen since we last met?
TH:
Haha, you tell me…
JG:
Well, one thing comes to mind… since our last episode, we’ve had a presidential election and an inauguration. And our new administration is blacklisting the word “climate” from grant applications, defunding university research, and enacting legislation that actively discourages renewable energy.
TH:
Right – it feels like in just a few months, the word “climate” has become something nobody wants to talk about anymore. Like it’s almost become a curse word.
JG:
Even top-notch scientists are struggling to get funding for climate-related research right now. And at the same time, the arts are under a lot of pressure too. It seems like we’re all being encouraged to practice some self-censorship.
TH:
Some of our universities and law firms certainly have been. I have to say, it feels pretty bleak here coming into this third season, at least for me. It just feels like after all that critical talk about the Anthropocene over the last decade, we’ve hit a point where people are just giving up, resigning themselves to the idea that nothing can be done to reverse human-caused climate change.
JG:
But it’s important to remember that individual people are still doing the work — activists for sure, but our behaviors have also changed over the last decade or so, our habits. Think about it, this time last year, the auto industry seemed fully committed to a substantial transition to electric vehicles. And even though our current administration has revoked the EV mandate and repealed tax credits, that doesn’t mean the desire for more environmentally friendly options is going to suddenly disappear.
TH:
That’s true. But I can’t help but feel that at the national level, at the administrative level, the idea of careful, measured, reciprocal action, based on understanding how everything is connected, is out. Like we’re going back to that old idea that exploiting the environment is just our natural right. And that the belief that humans are somehow separate from and can just use the nonhuman world is back in. There’s not much ground left for what we explored as the art of interference in previous seasons.
LK:
Look, let’s not get carried away. I traveled all across Europe this summer, and sure, no country is perfect on climate, including Norway where I spent several weeks. But climate is still a huge deal for them—culturally, scientifically, politically, and economically.
JG:
Did you make it to Oslo? I was there in 2022.
LK:
Totally. I hadn’t been in ages, and it’s changed a ton.
JG:
Yea, I remember there was a lot of construction near the waterfront when I was visiting.
TH:
A lot of that must be from the oil money, right?
LK:
For sure. But you know what really got me was how quiet the city is. So many cars and buses are electric now. Of course, that has its own issues, like we talk about in this episode. But it made me think that maybe our current despair about the climate—that feeling that we’ve already given up—is just another example of us thinking we’re the center of the universe. Another form of American exceptionalism.
TH:
What do you mean?
LK:
I mean, we shouldn’t assume everyone is failing at climate action just because the US is struggling. Any such thinking, if you ask me, is simply another form of provincialism, to be honest. Provincialists draw strict boundaries between you and me, here and there, old and new, this and that—provincialism isn’t anything any serious aesthetic of interference would advocate.
TH:
So, you’re saying we should be more hopeful, even when things look bad?
JG:
Or maybe recognize that excessive climate doom can be another form of climate change denial?
TH:
Right – sometimes it feels easier to just give up, not to take any action, to say the game’s been rigged. But we really can’t afford to do that – it’s a cliche to say it, but that’s true now more than ever.
LK:
Exactly. And there’s a lot we can learn from what people—artists, scientists, activists, regular folks—are doing in other parts of the world. Like the ones we talk to on this show.
PART TWO
PAR:
My name is Pablo Ampuero-Ruiz. Even though I’ve been living abroad, far away from my land of Chile for a long time, I keep insisting on using both of my last names. It’s important to me because we carry the name of our father and mother at the same time, and they both have been very important in who I have become.
LK:
Pablo grew up near Santiago de Chile, lived for many years in China, and studied in Chile and in Germany. He pursued research projects funded by various European research agency, and he now holds a position as assistant professor in social and economic anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is an expert in questions of electromobility—the use of electric cars—and he studies the social costs and blessings of what lithium batteries do across the globe. In whatever is his spare time, Pablo also works as a documentary photographer and hosts a podcast called “Todo Bajo el Cielo”–everything under the sky or the heaven.
PAR:
After finishing at the Max Blank Institute, I got a job, in the University of Amsterdam, in a project, funded by the ERC, the European Research Council called Worlds of Lithium. That was a really nice experience. Our common conversation was about electric batteries and electric mobility electric cars. My new research project builds on this, connecting ideologies of, energy transition and how we look at certain technologies like electromobility as a key driver of new sustainability models. But that depends so much on the extraction of minerals like lithium and copper. I’m very interested in connecting these parts, between how economists become green, the materialities that they require, and the technologies that they move. So, what kind of ideas we have about this, what to learn and what to unlearn.
LK:
Needless to say, perhaps, I really like the idea of doing research to learn and unlearn things at the same time. I met Pablo last fall during a conference on Germany on the future of automobility. His insights about the energy transition in China struck me. So, before asking him to untangle the triangle of lithium production that is at the core of Guely Morato’s work, I wanted to learn more about his views on why and how electric automobility has become such a big thing in China.
PAR:
What the Chinese have called ecological civilization, as a kind of broad definition, these approach to sustainability that also prioritizes economic growth and development especially social development.The Chinese have this idea of the two mountains. Mountains of, pristine water and clean fields are also mountains of gold out silver. So the idea there is that cleaning up the environment doesn’t need to be a cost, but also an opportunity for our economy. And that’s where electromobility makes a lot of sense because you’re putting out a technology that is essentially greener, that has low emissions. That effectively decontaminates the city, makes it much more livable. I was very surprised two years ago when I was doing field work in Shenzen, how much quieter it turned compared to my previous experiences there. It’s really quiet for China. This was a huge change. Less pollution, more blue skies.
The state has been very instrumental in protecting the economy. This is the great difference in China that the state committed before the economy and pushed economic actors to cross that line. And that has been that coordination that the state has put so much effort into by helping private actors. More directly: subsidies, tax cuts. And you have companies like BYD, they’re leading Chinese producer of electric cars, but also batteries, and CATL, one of the leading producers of electric batteries in the world. Both are private companies. Their biggest competitors are not Tesla for BYD or whatever American brand for CATL is another Chinese company. So that, I think it’s, a political commitment that is something we see in China that we do not necessarily see in other contexts
LK:
I wanted to talk to him about the resources necessary for these green economic transitions and the impact of lithium mining, in Chile and Argentina, in Bolivia, on local communities, on sacred sites.
PAR:
Even in this small triangle of the world, lithium can mean completely different things and that’s what makes it so fascinating. It’s not that the quality of lithium is different in terms of geochemistry. The process of extraction is relatively the same. What makes lithium different is a larger normative organization around it that enables it extraction. In this sense, we can talk about different qualities of lithium, in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia that embody different understandings of the economy and the relationship to the environment.
LK:
Argentina largely follows a free-market model of lithium mining, inviting foreign investment from China, Europe, and North America, with little regulation, to push extraction and profit forward.
PAR:
Chile’s a bit different. Chile is at this time the second largest producer of lithium. It has had two large historical producers one of them is an American company called Albemarle. a very large mining company, and the other one is a Chilean company called SQM, which used to be a state owned, chemical company. But during the Pinochet years, as with many of the state owned companies was privatized. It was sold to the son in law of the dictator or something around 10 pesos of the time. He was sold for $1 to the son-in-law who got divorced. But he kept the business. And he still has a lot of saying in the company.
LK:
What makes Chile’s case special is not only its state regulations and political entanglements. It’s also the fact that Chileans now have developed a national lithium strategy that includes the capacity to convert raw lithium into the more refined material necessary to build batteries.
PAR:
Chile is the only country besides China that has lithium processing capabilities. So SQM not only can deliver raw lithium like the Argentinians, actually SQM can send carbonate or hydroxide of lithium that can go directly to the battery.
LK:
What about the Bolivian story?
PAR:
The Bolivian story is completely different. The strategy they have tried to focus on is national development of the industry. And during Evo Morales government,
LK:
Pablo here is referring to the former president of Bolivia who served in office from 2006 to 2019
PAR:
They even pursued the strategy of creating their own vehicles and they created sample model. But they do not have the capacity to do that very quickly. So its a very slow process. Some Chinese participation is helping and some knowledge is being exchanged. They also lack the capital to really develop this very capital intensive and complex industries. So the resource in Bolivia has remained relatively protected.
LK:
Lithium extraction might look similar in different regions. But it takes different shapes and forms in different political and economic contexts. Lithium comes in the plural. And so does what we often take for granted about the present and future of mobility, the impact of its mining on local communities and the moral arguments we develop to justify future energy transitions.
PAR:
We know climate change is real. We know we need to do something about it. We need to do things differently, but at the same time, we need better tools or better instruments, better devices that would allow us to actually reduce our impact on Earth, or lower carbon emissions. That’s where electromobility comes in. The interesting thing about electromobility is that it’s a solution to one, but not to the other.
LK:
Electric vehicles, or EVs, can reduce carbon emission and thus address the issue of warming. What they don’t do however is to make us rethink our ideas of mobility in the first place, the way in which we have largely coupled mobility to freedom and understood both as open invitations to exploit natural resources.
PAR:
In a lot of the European cars, the morality is embedded in the car. It has an extra branding in the car, it says zero emissions. The electric vehicle in Europe is a status symbol economically, but also morally.
LK:
And, at least until recent federal defunding for green initiatives, the same has held true for the US.
PAR:
Whereas in China is just a convenience. The morality in China is not an individual exercise, the state says, we do electromobility, we commit to this because it’s good for the world. But that’s not something people would mobilize. And in Europe, it’s comparable to the US, individuals will change their behavior because of moral environmental commitment.
LK:
What you need is a different understanding of mobility, a different idea of mobility – one that doesn’t follow the parameters of individual solutionism.
PAR:
The technology should not determine us, but rather we should establish the boundaries of how we engage with that technology. Sometimes we have to say, no, I’m just not gonna buy the car that can drive faster, that can charge faster because I just need to go to the supermarket. I see this here in Europe. People are starting to think, do I actually need the latest phone? And they say, no, I need a phone that I can repair. So other values start to be central. Maybe we don’t need to follow that American conviction of bigger, better, faster, maybe we can just slow down, reduce, be more sustainable. And that’s leading to a conversation about: maybe I don’t need to drive to Poland. I don’t need to drive to Italy. I don’t need to fly. I can just take the train, et cetera. So all of these things are connected and mobility’s a very good entry to that sort of conversation.
INTERFERENCE TWO
JG:
Hold on. Can I jump in? Wouldn’t most people think Pablo is taking this too far? It’s one thing to say we should use electric cars to lower our carbon footprint. But it’s a huge leap to demand a whole new way of thinking about mobility and travel—not just physically, but virtually, socially, maybe even spiritually. Are people actually ready for that?
LK:
It’s interesting you bring this up, Jen. Last semester, I taught a class on the eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline. In the film, one of the young characters goes around slicing the tires of SUVs. Their point isn’t just that SUVs are wasteful city vehicles, but that their pollution is a direct attack on people’s health.
JG:
What do you think, Tori?
TH:
Damaging someone’s property as a form of protest? Hmm —
JG:
But your students weren’t into it?
LK:
No! One of them said, “What if you slash the tires on a soccer mom’s car when she’s trying to get a bunch of kids to practice?” Another one argued that you should never use violence as a political tool, even if you think you’re defending people from a broken system.
JG:
That’s a fair enough point. But maybe the real issue is somewhere else, right?
TH:
What do you mean?
LK:
Okay, so my students felt that slashing tires interferes with a person’s freedom and convenience to get around easily. Right?
JG:
Right – but they’re focused on a question of convenience versus inconvenience, right?
TH:
But isn’t it necessary to tolerate inconvenience when we’re facing an issue the size of climate change? After all, it’s a question of what’s more inconvenient in the long run – whether the inconvenience of charging your car for longer than it takes to fill up a tank is bigger than the inconvenience of cleaning up oil spills and trying to handle rising sea levels.
JG:
Which, to be fair, is a question of the individual versus the collective. It’s easy to expect the broader culture to do the right thing, and to take a short-cut ourselves. It kind of goes back to human time versus geological time.
LK:
Right. The tire-slasher could argue back that a car’s emissions interfere with their right to breathe clean air and walk through the city safely. And to bring it back to today’s topic: the use of mining lithium to fuel our cars and our desire for convenience disrupts the planet’s own slow clock—the millions of years it takes for the Earth to form these materials.
JG:
You’re really highlighting how different ideas about time and movement are clashing right now. Our idea of being able to go wherever we want, whenever we want—whether it’s powered by gas or lithium—is built on a culture of that takes time away from the Earth.
LK:
We’re digging up its deep, ancient history to move ourselves quickly into the future.
TH:
Say that again, please.
LK:
What I mean is, our modern world is built on strange contradictions: we heavily rely on geological time—on materials that took eons to form—to fuel our need to go faster and faster. We’re consuming the Earth’s deep past to enable our high-speed lives.
JG:
So, we’re forcing our concept of time and movement to compete with the Earth’s. And we’re basically choosing our own to win.
LK:
Exactly. And I think that’s Pablo’s whole point. We need to rethink what “mobility” means.
TH:
To think of it in more pluralistic terms, right? Our current speed impacts others – it messes with slower processes.
LK:
Isn’t that part of the point of this project? We’re trying to explore the Earth as a place with many different speeds and many different stories, all happening at once. Slashing tires probably isn’t the solution. But on some level, it asks tough questions about the true cost of our convenience and our visions of progress.
JG:
Right – why is your sense of speed more important than mine? Why is it allowed to trample on my health? Or on the Earth’s pace of renewal?
LK:
And what will it take for all these different timelines to coexist peacefully or generatively.
PART III
JA:
We’re all using lithium.
LK:
This is John Ayers again, the Vanderbilt geochemist, asked about the global inequities of lithium extraction today
JA:
The question is what’s the best way to mine it that, impacts people and ecosystems the least? And if it does impact them, then they need to be compensated in some way.
LK:
Guely Morato’s community and research-based work over the last decade insist: we are far from a more balanced ecosystem of lithium mining. Her latest project, once again carried out with her collaborator Victor Mazon, is called Triangle of Sacrifice.
GM:
Sacrifice is a legal term that the lawyers use to describe, a territory, that have been systematically exposed to severe environmental damage.
LK:
The project has various prongs, one of which is a durational installation responding to data gathered from lithium extraction sites in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. The work consists of three triangular sculptures that stand in the center of a room, each bears the engraved topographies of different salt flats and sites of lithium extraction. All are forged from different metals that commemorate previous histoires of colonial extraction: bronze for Argentina, silver for Bolivia, and copper for Chile.
GM:
We are trying to connect in dots. We are trying to rebuild what happened in this global South. All these green washing. This is not a secret, this is a reality.
LK:
Triangle of Sacrifice was first presented at Ars Electronica in Austria in 2024, then at a gallery in Colombia, and it has now been moved to a private collection in Miami. In the exhibition, a lamp and three saline drip systems have been placed above each of the three sculptures. The drip rate is calibrated to represent the number of tons of lithium sold by each country, multiplied by two million liters of water—the water it takes to process one ton of lithium used to energize the Global North’s green energy transition. Each drop represents 100,000 liters, and causes the bronze, silver, and copper to corrode over time. Meanwhile, visitors of the exhibit can listen to a musical composition specially designed for the occasion. This composition works like a clockwork. It both measures and embodies time—the time our quest for continued movement, speed, and future energy resources, the time denied to the human and nonhuman entities that coexist in the triangle of sacrifice.
GM:
The composition is based on the agricultural calendar and incorporates the voices of the human and more than human The sculptures, they are exposed to a dripping selling solution system. So, at the end, the sculptures are going to erode and the audio piece will also self-destruct. At the end we got this black space and we are going to listen only to wind.
VM:
The idea of the composition is the composition itself. It will decay. Instead of generating something new from an algorithm, the algorithm monitored the lithium extraction in, in accordance to the water needs. So if you need so much water and then use the water and then there is then less, eh, hydric material, there will be less fauna and less, less flora. And this will live to a silence.
GM:
Listening takes time, and we are sustaining a deep listening to and with the territory, and it’s a, it’s a compromise with the, with this deep, diverse ways to, to be.
LK:
Triangle of Sacrifice invites us to do something radical: to listen. To listen to degraded environments, the landscapes scarred by our relentless demands. And to listen with them, understand Earth as a condition for our listening.
Triangle of Sacrifice may strike viewers and listeners as apocalyptic: a representation of end times. The project mourns the destruction of land and people in the process of neocolonial extraction, it bemoans the mining of deep time.
And yet, there is something truly reparative about this project as well, something hopeful about listening to the wind at its end. Triangle of Sacrifice urges us understand that extraction isn’t just about pulling resources from the earth for profit. It’s a way of thinking. It’s a mindset. It’s a specific, and as Guely would argue, a distorted way of seeing and sensing the world. Guely’s work tells us that the metabolic exchanges between the human and the nonhuman can’t be boiled down to simple numbers, formulas, or cold calculations. Nature resists the contemporary language of transactionalism. To listen to the wind on its own terms allows us to break dominant patterns of perception and thought. It allows us to recognize that life on this planet does not follow the logic of zero-sum games.
CONCLUSION
LK:
When you think about art history and its reliance on different metals, you probably think of gold and silver. For centuries, these precious metals were at the center of it all—either as the material for priceless artworks or as the money that made the art world go ’round. Lithium’s role in the history of art may at first pale in the face of all this. But look twice, listen for more than a split second, consider the entire infrastructure that makes the art world tick—and you will come to different conclusions. Lithium is everywhere.
Rumor has it that Russia invited Bolivia to use the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024 in exchange for state-level agreements about Russian access to Bolivian lithium deposits. Li-ion batteries are pretty much in charge of the entire framework that enables contemporary art: artists’ Instagram posts that announce coming attractions, selfies visitors send from galleries to friends and family, art podcasts we listen to on the fly, tickets people download to their mobile phones en route to the next art biennial. Contemporary art cannot do without lithium.
When we think about the future of energy, about a world free from the grip of carbon, lithium often figures as a central player. It’s the lightest metal on the periodic table, yet it carries the immense weight of our hopes for a green transition. But as we race towards a electrified, lithium-powered future, are we truly leaving the destructive habits of the past behind?
Given the weight of this question, it should come as no surprise that lithium is capturing the imagination of many artists today, including Guely Morató and her collaborator Victor Mazon. Their work serves as a stark reminder that a carbon-free future doesn’t automatically mean a future free from the old wounds of extractivism and colonial exploitation. Simply swapping a gasoline-powered car for an electric one does little to heal the fundamental disconnect we’ve created between modern culture and the natural world. If we fail to fundamentally rethink what it means to move, to be mobile, we’re just perpetuating the same old story with a different power source.
Here’s the inconvenient truth they present to us: many of our well-intentioned dreams of zero-emission futures are still trapped within extractive logics borrowed from the past. The very logics that created our current climate emergency in the first place. The colonial logics of sacrifice zones, of disposable lands and peoples.
This is why lithium is so prominent in contemporary art right now. It forces us to confront the entangled reality of our existence—that the human and the more-than-human are inextricably linked. It presents our present moment not as a single, linear timeline, but as a dynamic meeting ground of different durations: the fleeting time of our daily commutes, the time of our lifespans and other animate beings, and the deep, slow, steady time of the Earth itself.
As it appears in contemporary art, the light metal of lithium often asks heavy questions about how to rebalance this relationship. It challenges our dominant notions of progress, of development, of relentless speed and thoughtless mobility. It asks us to pause, to listen, and to consider the true cost of our, of any forward momentum.