S3E1: Lithium
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Host: Lutz Koepnick
Lithium plays a key role in the green energy transition. Its extraction, however, comes at considerable costs for the environment and for local communities, particularly in the so-called lithium triangle in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. In this episode, we speak with artist and curator Guely Morató Loredo and her collaborator, sound artist Victor Mazón Gardoqui, about two projects that engage with the mining of lithium in South America today, its devastating impact on Indigenous people and sacred sites, and its connection to much older histories of colonial extraction. We also hear from social anthropologist Pablo Ampuero-Ruiz about the rise of electric cars, their reliance on lithium, and the need to develop new ideas of mobility; and from geochemist John Ayers about the challenging, water-intense process of lithium extraction.
For more about Guely and Victor’s wak’a and Triangle of Sacrifice projects, follow these links:
https://sonandes.org/waka/
https://sonandes.org/tos/
Both sites include numerous texts, videos, interviews, and audio clips detailing the wide-ranging nature of their artistic research and their collaborative and community-based aesthetic interventions.
Visit https://www.ampueroruiz.com/ to learn more about Pablo Ampuero-Ruiz’s work as a scholar and photographer; and https://my.vanderbilt.edu/johncayers/ for more about John Ayers’s research on water, rocks, and minerals.
