Beneath the Salinas Grandes in Jujuy province luminescent, blue-green water swirls and eddies; in these fluid depths, adamantine minerals catalyse ancient forms of life in salt, silica and brine. These are the hidden waters of the salar, the living mother’s body – Pachamama – much more than a salt-encrusted terrain. Above, buoyant clouds on atmospheric currents between the radiant sun and volcanic peaks mirror the subterranean unfurling of water below. For centuries the waterways and the wide-open skies overhead nourished the songs, plantings of potatoes, beans and salt harvest, and spiritual rites of the Andean communities who dwell here. Today, travellers from afar warm and whet their senses in this sun-blazed land, perforated with jewel-like pools. Yet the mineral residues beneath the high altitude lakes in Jujuy have also attracted miners for the rare silvery-white metal of lithium; the salt crust is now pierced by orthogonal cuts, the waters rerouted, and heavy machinery clangs in the air. To feel the bright light and dream of rising places us at an ethical crossroads between sustaining abiotic entities, biotic life and Indigenous human rights to life-fuelling water and the ecological calamity of ‘green mining’ for lithium. The people of this place say; If our grandparents and ancestors lived without lithium, we can survive as well.

In the skies over the salt flats, an emissary of fuel-free, aerosolar flight is pushed up and up again into the currents by solar heat and many companioning hands. This air-filled, weather-borne balloon releases human bodies from the ties of gravity, that weighs heavily at high altitude, lifting the spirits and imaginings of the Aerocene community of Indigenous activists, aeronauts, artists, engineers. This collective has been woven together over many decades of communing, workshops and aerosolar flight experiments initiated by artist Tomás Saraceno. The territory of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc in the north is cared for by over thirty communities including La Salina, Tres Pozos, Pozo Colorado and San Miguel del Colorado, and in the south by the community of Inti Killa de Tres Morros. Aerocene Pacha is named after a cosmological force, the space-time meeting of the subterranean, terrestrial and celestial realms of the Andean cosmos, binding the extremophile beings and mineral reserves far beneath the Earth’s surface with the birds and insects of the earth’s intimate atmosphere, then beyond to the distant reaches of the solar system.

The Aerocene Pacha balloon’s lighter-than-air fabric captures ultraviolet rays of solar radiation inside it’s dark interior, warming the balloon’s internal air temperature above the air outside. The albedo (surface reflectivity of sunlight) of the white salt flats creates warming currents that aerate the balloon, until the passenger floats aloft, as high as 300 metres in the air. While cars of plastic, metal, oil and lithium weigh heavily on the earth’s beneficence in movements reigned by roads and borders, the balloon sails a gentle pennant of resistance. The perceptual horizon of the salar creates a shimmering mirror of the floating mobile, counterweighted by gravity’s stabilizing pull back to our terrestrial origins. Like a softly feathered bird, the black balloon is an intermediary: between the earthly struggle for land and water sovereignty on the one hand – and on the other – far above the clamour of machinery, the lightness and contingency of the vagaries of the wind’s currents, and the propelling heat of our closest star. In ancient Rome, grave political decisions were governed by observations of the flight and behaviours of birds. Philosopher Michel Serres describes the fine attunement of the Roman augurs, listening carefully to the birds, widening our perceptual window to the biophysical world, where language comes undone and the senses guide us. The small bird pococho of the Salinas Grandes sings and sings in fine weather yet it lies still as death when it is about to rain, foretelling the weather. While in Māori cosmology, the appearance of birds is a tohu, a sign to take notice of the dead, a whispery medium of the ātua, the divine beings. The Aerocene Pacha balloon is a gentle cue to listen to the creatures and communities of Salinas Grandes, to adjust ourselves to the thermal currents and take heed of the new weathers, the infrequent rains, the anger of storms.

For many of us who live in cities, water spouts easily from taps, air circulates from temperature controlled units, and commuting is cosseted by cars. The thin curve of breathable atmosphere has swiftly reached an untenable limit to absorb the carbon residue of oil and coal, and the tantalising promise of the E-revolution beckons as a tech-fix for the carbonized atmosphere. Yet the dark lithium batteries wedged beneath silent cars or lining our mobile phones and laptops comes with a cost for the rights of people, land, and our more-than-human relations. This new industry thirsts for water. The drilling and the evaporation process of lithium mining requires millions of gallons of water to wrestle the lithium from magnesium and other minerals. Few will ever see the violence of open drilling of the salt crust, or the pumping machinery that drinks voraciously from the salts waters of ancestor-bodies from groundwater basins. The lithium is left after evaporation, the springs dry out, with only contaminated residue left for those who dwell in the salar. Yet, if ever city-dwellers find the water ceases from the taps at our homes, our fragile dependence on fundamental infrastructure leave us hopelessly exposed. Fossil-fuel-burning humanity habituated a fast pace of movement and consumption by wrenching up the oil of ancient forests and draining waterways. The same neo-colonial path continues with the gloss of emission-free, clean-mining, obscuring the effect of lithium mining on Indigenous lands and waters throughout the global ‘South.’

From where I write in Aotearoa New Zealand, lithium prospecting in our geothermal regions is just beginning (also from a kind of fossil water or brine) in the heartland of Indigenous Māori lands around the Ohaaki silica field. We carry much of the burden of resourcing Euro-American dependencies even while we suffer disproportionately in tropical and subtropical regions in the Pacific. We are facing surges in cyclonic weather, and often catastrophic rains that overflow the tailings from mining into fresh water-systems. Nearby Australia supplies roughly half the world’s lithium from the open-cut pegmatite deposits created in the collision of ancient landmasses. In many places, such as Cape York peninsula in Northern Queensland, the State prioritize mining venture capital’s prospecting rights over Aboriginal land rights. The parallel targeting of lithium beneath the earth by mining companies, and the governments who grant permits in the ‘lithium triangle’ across Argentina, Bolivia and Chile obscures or denies the impact of this water-intensive process in regions facing serious water scarcity. The associated mining of the Pacific ocean, around Nauru, for instance, for nickel and cobalt, on which many lithium-ion batteries depend, is also of grave concern for us. Mining the seabed as ‘mare nullius,’ or outside of any country’s jurisdiction, is no less contentious than terrestrial mining or filling the air with greenhouse gases. We have culturally imagined the Southern skies, seas, our salt lakes as untamed, unpeopled sites for commercial endeavour, while the wounded atmosphere, terrestrial and marine biome cry out against this fallacy.

Art-making often hovers at the untenable edge of energy technologies, inventing emergent models of kinetic movement, devising eccentric systems, new kinds of weather quasi-instruments and togethering moments of resistance. Energy exists in the quantifying language of neo-capitalist production as resource, however many artists engage energetic forces more openly: as spiritual, cultural catalysts for eco-social change. Saraceno and the Aerocene community offer sun-powered flight as a manifesto, a provocation, an ecopoetic movement, and a rigorous experiment in just energy transition involving an international network of scientists, artists and engineers. They create a new socio-metabolic regime, questioning the hierarchy of who has the right to exist and provide or be provided with energy. The Aerocene Manifesto asks: “What are the rights of pass, the corridors we need to open, in order to restore the right to drift and breathe? How can we overcome the paradox of decisions made by the few, simultaneously forcing and inhibiting the mobility and breathability of the multi-species many?” To attend to the tangible effects of extracting the precious metals that lie deep in the earth, to listen to Indigenous voices is critical. For the people of the salar, the piercing of the land presents manifold effects on both human and natural systems. A zone of sacrifice is created in the South, in the words of Luis Martín-Cabrera, amounting to a “terricidio” or (earthcide), and an end to a cultural way of being and knowing. The weight of resistance to mining has been left to Indigenous communities of the South for far too long; now is the time for companioning hands.

We must decarbonize, yes, but Aerocene Pacha propels us to keep searching for viable solutions other than mining for lithium-ion batteries: let’s alter our own habits of consumption and movement; let’s revisit our own detritus of phones and batteries to retrieve the lithium in e-waste instead of further carving up the earth. In free-floating aerosolar flight, we feel the kinetic energy of motion, the elevating of imagination and spirit with the birds, from the weather-forecasting pococho to the quiet strength of wings of the Kuntur (condor). This lightness and sensitivity to the atmospheric embrace, known so intimately by Indigenous communities and our avian companions, urges us to let the salar be; to let the salt flats exist, shimmer and fly into the light.

Humans have always dreamt of flying,
But, today, flight has become a nightmare.
1.3 million people in the air at any given time,
1 billion tons of CO2 released annually.
50% of aviation emissions,
caused by 1% of the world’s population.
80% of people have never travelled by aeroplane.

Let’s float with another dream.
Who dares to fly differently?

I have to confess that when the Pachamama ritual began, I was shedding tears of emotion behind my glasses. At the same time, I was nervous, the Wiphala (emblem of the Andean peoples of South America) was waving too much. The wind was blowing so strongly that I thought we were never going to take off. I could only think of all the friends and family who had come all the way here and would not be able to witness the performance. We were at an altitude of over 3600 metres and it was hard to breathe. My 10-year-old nephew Manuel kept throwing up. If I had known, I would have told him that a natural ‘slow movement’ was forcing us to walk differently. We were drifting together like the saying of the civil rights movement called for: move as slow as you can, as fast as you must.

“It’s going to be alright,” said Verónica from Santuario Tres Pozos. “The first thing is to thank Pachamama,” Néstor and Rubén responded. Together with them, the original inhabitants of these lands shared their ancestral knowledge in a ritual of gratitude to the Pachamama, Mother Earth. The ceremony thanked the earth, the water, the sun and the moon with offerings, wishing good fortune for the day’s flight. But the wind would not stop and, between too many words and a lack of concentration, I gave a welcome-speech that I’d rather forget. It was impossible to focus.

The weather forecasts predicted a lot of wind; the night before, a storm and thousands of lightning strikes had left us isolated. The river had grown too high, and it was not possible to cross it again. There was no way for me to warn the guests! In those territories there is very little telephone signal. We would have to predict the weather and communicate differently, rethink who our guests were. It is said in the Andean cultures, that when the body of the spider changes to blue, it announces rain. The meteorological-spiders, the weather inscribed in the clouds; it was other signs, for another kind of take-off, which we were looking for. We were looking for a truce, a time with no cell phone signal, but with other links, connecting us differently. In this region, you thank Mother Earth as part of the family, and so the ritual continued, with a confidence that I was mindful not to lose again.

From the experience gained in the previous weeks, and the previous decades, I knew that if we did not take off within the next 30 minutes, it would be impossible. I decided to ask everyone to start heading towards the launching site, and that’s when I realised what a tide of people we were. It looked like a procession and the calm of walking on this white canvas began to strengthen me.

Before, the quena was not heard due to the wind; now we could hear it loud and clear. The wind had calmed down and the music was beginning to fill us with hope. Tata Inti, Father Sun, was shining on the horizon like never before. I was slowly realising, at an ever-increasing pace, that maybe it was indeed going to happen.

I was trying to control my emotions, while remembering what my mom was also probably thinking of: 10 years before, in a situation akin to this one, she saw me fall from a similar flying sculpture. It resulted in a broken back, two operations and over 12 screws in my spine. But this time it should be different. The experience healed us. Now we were much more prepared. Aerocene Pacha embodied 20 years of collective research and design, resulting in a safe vehicle, a sculpture, an aircraft that was still experimental but respected all precautions and certifications required by international organisations and controls. Nevertheless, Leticia was the only professional pilot in Argentina who accepted the challenge; she would be the first woman to fly only with the sun and the air, without burners, solar panels, helium or lithium.

Once at the launch site, the sculpture, specially made of black fabric to absorb the sun’s heat, started to slowly inflate. Aerocene Pacha, impassive, was heating up and every second I thought, “let it rise, let the sun warm the air, before the wind gets too strong again and it doesn’t allow us to take off”.

But slowly, silently, called by the sun, Leticia started to walk at the speed of the wind. Step by step she was losing gravity, lifting off of our shoulders, into the ocean of air. She would slowly start to rise…and then come back down, but her steps were getting increasingly longer. At first, she would float just 10 centimetres above the ground, then 1 metre, 10 metres, until she reached an altitude of 176 metres and floated a distance of 1.7 kilometres for 21 minutes.

Tears and more emotion…”Go, Leticia. Go!”.

As the sculpture turned in the air, another message was made visible, maybe the most important one: “Water and life are worth more than lithium” was written in giant letters on the sculpture. This is the message of the indigenous communities who live in the surroundings of the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc basin. Their struggle against lithium mining is a fight against a green energy transition occurring in the North, which is being primarily paid for by the peoples of the South. Their message stands for a different dream…

And so it was that Aerocene Pacha rose into the sky. We followed her incredulous, relieved, hopeful, in a shared magical moment.

After landing, we returned to ‘base’, walking again the 3 km that we had inadvertently moved
accompanying Aerocene Pacha. Exhausted, with muddy feet, we met again, full of emotion, with all those who had not been able to follow Leticia due to the distance and the heat.

It wasn’t Andean music we heard now; the rhythms were different as crowds of teenagers from Salta, Jujuy and Tucumán danced and sang in Korean. The BTS fans had arrived, celebrating with perfect choreographies and synchronised dance steps. Was this the same planet we were on before takeoff? 100 metres away, indigenous people, among coplas, locro and empanadas, were lifting more banners denouncing the extraction of lithium, flying other aerosolar sculptures while Leticia received congratulations.

Had we just witnessed other possible futures? Was this, perhaps, part of the revolution that Maristella Svampa was calling for: feminist and ecological, collective, plural, and collaborative? Away from the patriarchal dream of colonising space, floating in the ocean air, we drifted with the rivers of the wind, united by solidarity. Quietly, slowly, without explosions or burners, Leticia took a small step in the air that could be a giant step for this planet Earth and its climate. It was a cosmic flight that took us far beyond the moon.

On January 25, 2020, the aerosolar sculpture Aerocene Pacha flew with a message “Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium”, written with the Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc in Jujuy, Argentina, who are raising their voices in unison against harmful lithium extraction practices in northern Argentina. Fly with Aerocene Pacha stands in solidarity with them. Floating completely free from fossil fuels, batteries, lithium, solar panels, helium, and hydrogen, Aerocene pilot Leticia Noemi Marqués set 32 world records recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI). This achievement marks the most sustainable flight in human history and one of the most important experiments in the history of aviation.

While birds, seeds, spores and others have been flying sustainably for millennia – drifting with thermal currents – humans have only achieved this with – for example, paragliders and delta planes – for short distances and durations. Aerocene stands for an era where humans will evolve in the air as plants and other animals have evolved on water, learning to float and not fly, moving with the rivers of the wind. Might our dear interspecies friends welcome us in this stage of Homo flotantis?

There are two ways of flying: one follows the principles of aerodynamics. Airplanes, helicopters, and rockets, for example, have a greater density than the air. This kind of heavier-than-air aircraft does not depend on buoyancy for support but, instead, gains lift from aerodynamic forces. When, in 1891, Otto Lilienthal began flying gliders, he built a 10 meter tall tower to gain the necessary lift to drag ratio. In 1903, the Wright brothers used gasoline engines to power the propellers of Kitty Hawk, the first airplane. The Apollo XI mission to the moon in 1969 was powered by kerosene; whilst the Solar Impulse world circumnavigation from 2015 to 2016, used lithium polymer batteries charged by photovoltaic cells to generate the electricity that powered the motors.

The second way of flying follows the principles of aerostatics. In this case, lighter-than-air crafts like balloons and dirigibles, among others, rise and float into the atmosphere by establishing buoyancy, historically through the use of gases such as hydrogen or helium or hot air heated by a burner using propane and other fuels. When the Montgolfier brothers’ hot air balloon lifted a human into the air for the first time in 1783, for example, they used fire to fly into the sky.

In contrast, in the record setting flight of Aerocene Pacha, Leticia achieved aerostatic lift-off using only air heated by the sun, and both sculpture and pilot floated for a record 16 minutes over a distance of 667.85 meters. The flight of Aerocene Pacha is one beyond the use of aerodynamics: this lighter-than-air vehicle lifts slowly in concert with the stillness-in-motion of aerostatics, with no fuel and no force. It is the hallmark of a new era, an era in which all co-inhabitants of the Earth recognize that we are onboard a shared planet, in a collective journey around itself and the sun.

Find out more about the flight of Aerocene Pacha and the Aerocene Foundation at aerocene.org

Fly with Aerocene Pacha was produced by the Aerocene Foundation and Studio Tomás Saraceno. Supported by Connect, BTS, curated by DaeHyung Lee. The Aerocene Foundation is made possible by the generous support of Espace Muraille Eric and Caroline Freymond.

Aerocene App

This artwork invites you to move differently, floating with the rhythms of the planet. Become part of a community that changes habits, not the climate -towards an Aerocene era!

Incorporating real-time information from 16-day forecasts of wind speeds at different altitudes, the Aerocene App is a navigational tool used to plan journeys in the Aerocene era, bringing us closer to an alternative future where we move with the rhythms of the planet. Floating free from borders and fossil-fuels, we can lift off on our very own aerosolar journey guided only by the heat of the sun and the earth, and the air we all breathe. A digital gallery of Aeroglyphs – signatures in the air – chart the trajectories of the 7976 (and counting) virtual flights that have taken place so far on the Aerocene App.

Real Flights are recorded via an interactive global archive. The Aerocene community has launched numerous aerosolar sculptures lifted only by the sun and the air, carried only by the wind. Through the Aerocene app, you can connect with the Aerocene community to join a real flight or engage with the over 103 tethered, 16 free and 8 human Aerocene flights that have floated in more than 43 different countries. The App’s new Augmented Reality functionality invites us to live an immersive experience by visualizing the invisible drawing made by an aero solar sculpture as it flies. Visit the location of an Aerocene flight to see the trace of its trajectory, or place an archived one onto a chosen site, for a renewed way to sense the air and decolonize the earth from fossil fuel regimes.

While fossil fuel based industries continue their attempts to colonise other planets, the air, this common interface of terrestrial life, continues to be compromised: carbon emissions fill the air, particulate matter floats inside our lungs while electromagnetic radiation envelops the earth, dictating the tempo of surveillance capitalism. This control held by the few enacts the suffering of the multi-species many in the current era of ecological crisis. This neocolonial extractivist logic now extends to the energy transition. In a cruel irony, the ‘green rush’ to mine lithium for batteries is polluting and reducing one of the Earth’s most crucial elements: water. In the 21st century, lithium has become the new frontier of capitalist expansion.

A different era is needed, one which radically upturns fossil narratives of materiality, and re-examines the inscribed notions of property and properties, human and inhuman, of production and subjection. How would breathing feel in a post fossil fuel era? How can we challenge the dominance of dispossessing geopolitical forces, and overcome the extractive approach to Earth and the wealth of life it provides for? Together, we call for a new era: Aerocene.

Aerocene is a proposal—a scene in, on, for, and with the air—towards a reciprocal alliance with the elements capable of restoring the air to a commonwealth of life.

Aerocene imagines space as a commons, a physical and imaginative place subtracted from corporate control and government surveillance.

Aerocene promotes de-securitized, free access to the atmosphere, through new tools and relational practices emerging from communities attempting to move the Earth’s masses towards a post fossil fuel era.

This new era achieves lift off through an aerosolar balloon, a Do-It-Together (DIT) entrance to the aerial, whose only non-engine is the wealth of energy gifted by the Sun. Once inflated and heated by the Sun, it elevates into the air, becoming a flying sculpture that rises without the use of fossil fuels, helium, hydrogen, solar panels, batteries or burners. In floating without carbon emissions, these aerosolar journeys speculate on the kinds of nomadic socio-political structures that may emerge if we could navigate the rivers of the atmosphere. This is to become airnomads, realizing, as wished by Rosi Braidotti, the “non fixity of boundaries and [to] develop a desire to go on trespassing”. This is to move from Homo economicus to Homo Flotantis: attuned to planetary rhythms, conscious of living with other humans and non-humans, and who floats with the ocean of air, uprooting dominant geo-centric logics towards embodying an ever more entangled relationship with the atmosphere and the cosmos.

In bearing the consequences of the fossil-capital regime’s material practice of extraction, the atmosphere has become a highly stressed zone of the commonly composed terrestrial world. Aerodynamics, in constant movement and transformation, inherently entail complex spatial, temporal, socio-political and ecological processes, and today embodies the unequal relations of power projected upwards from the land. Hegemonic modes of re-/production in the midst of the Capitalocene, along with human mobility and organisation within the web of life, has enacted the breach of atmospheric pollution thresholds, with CO2 emissions now exceeding more than 400 ppm (Particulates Per Million). This corruption of the air is the trigger for state shifts in Earth’s systems, the critical changes already under way, with planetary temperatures increasing and multifold inequalities proliferating in an age of resurgent nationalism and geopolitical instability.

Our attention to the air and what it carries was heightened in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic. By wearing face-masks, we recognized the power of our breath; we also recognized that health is a collective measure, that in an interconnected world in which we are all musicians in a jam session, we must act in responsibility to the other. Environmental racism proved once again to have disastrous, deathly consequences during the COVID-19 crisis. Though inherently a virus cannot discriminate, the social systems in place can, and they guarantee that some will be infected while others will not and some will recover while others will not. COVID-19 was spoken of in terms of war; environmental racism is also, in a way, a war, with numerous casualties and countless battlegrounds. As Achille Mbembe wrote, “All these wars on life begin by taking away breath.” As such, our attack response must be against “everything that condemns the majority of humankind to a premature cessation of breathing, everything that fundamentally attacks the respiratory tract, everything that, in the long reign of capitalism, has constrained entire segments of the world population, entire races, to a difficult, panting breath and life of oppression.”

What are the rights of pass, the corridors we need to open, in order to restore the right to drift and breathe? How can we overcome the paradox of decisions made by the few, simultaneously forcing and inhibiting the mobility and breathability of the multi-species many? Aerocene calls for an interplanetary ecology of practice which could reconnect with elemental sources of energy and the strata borne from the Sun and other planets, rising upwards – downwards and inwards- towards an era of renewed symbiotic relations and sensitivities within life’s entanglements. We suggest a model for a landscape that balances and harnesses our relationship with the unlimited potential of the Sun. This realisation requires a thermodynamic leap of imagination, just like during an eclipse, when only in the absence of light do we become aware of our scale in the shadow of the cosmos.

Researchers in industrial and social ecology refer to ‘socio-metabolic regimes’ to define the epochal shifts in energetic relationships between humans and their environment, establishing a strict correlation between it and specific sets of social values. They argue that two of the main kinds of these regimes have been solar based, the ones of hunter-gatherer societies and those of agrarian. Despite the existence of societies that still embody such relationships with the sun—together with all the other species and life forms—they, and the conditions for today’s civilisational infrastructures, are threatened by the domination of the current socio-metabolic regime, the one based on fossil fuels, powering the Capitalocene.

This raises the urgency to rethink modes of being, and co-existence with the planet, and all our species share it with. What could be the fourth socio-metabolic regime? What are our varying response-abilities within the current crises of our social, mental and environmental ecologies under capitalism? What would be the new set of values necessary to drift us from the shadow sun of fossil capital, returning our socio-politically captured senses to that of the Earth, rather than the imaginaries of the global and national?

It may be through a rearticulation of our relationship with the Sun, air and cosmos that we open the boundaries of the Earth, to inhabit space with renewed interplanetary sensitivity, for this world and all others — free from borders, free from fossil fuels, free from neocolonial extractivism. Aeronauts, unite!

Traces of outer space in the salt flats, vibrant lithium was already being cared for by indigenous communities ten thousand years ago. About the supposed saviour in the energy transition and some disobediences infiltrating the global climate disaster landscape.

The world history of lithium recounts that this “silver-white pebble”, which excites capitalism, had a glorious introduction on the planet since the dense and hot Big Bang, the same event that leads Carl Sagan to affirm that we are stardust. Cosmology describes the great explosion that would begin the physical reality of the Earth, but it does not explain the unbridled voracity of one of the living animals to consume it and the continuous creation of mirages. Of the three elements that were synthesised on the planet, lithium settled in the South American salt flats, associated with bodies of water, in that rich origin soup 13 million years ago.

Then, there was a long silence.

No one knew of this vibrant, chemical element sleeping in the salt flats, nothing was said of its golden destiny in this present age of anthropocentric dementia.

In 1817, a young Swedish student infiltrated a laboratory, isolated the soft, silvery lithium for the first time and tried to cut it with a knife; that fragment coming from the island of Utö started the curiosity for the cosmic residue.

Then, in 1949, Dr. Cade, an Australian psychiatrist who had been a prisoner of war in a terrifying Japanese concentration camp, replaced electric shock therapies and lobotomies with lithium. He advertised “lithium salts for the treatment of psychotic excitement”.

All of this brings us to discuss Catalano, the Argentinean scholar who explored the salt flats of the Andean high plateau in the 1920s – Dr. Bruno Fornillo, a member of the collective Geopolítica y Bienes Comunes together with Melisa Argento, mentions him as he drives attentively to his selection of national rock music and the mountain road at 4100 m above sea level that we cross to return to San Salvador de Jujuy, after the art and activism meeting with the communities, convened by Aerocene. Catalano, the rare metals enthusiast, explored the salt flats with a developmentalist vision. In the Salar del Hombre Muerto he imagined, during the Puna night, with his eyes full of stars, the “Argentinean plan of industrial mobilisation” to free the people from a “pest wave that spreads and break the chains of the foreign debt with the global North” and “to free the child from the clutches of those moulders of eunuchs, servants and slaves” by nationalising resources such as lithium for the people. But which people was Catalano talking about in his radical and pamphlet-like speeches?

It turns out that this vibrant, electrochemical matter, a vestige of outer space in the salt flats, was already being cared for by the indigenous peoples ten thousand years ago. And there they are now, even if the litieras in their outpost declare that there is no one there, only shadows in their nightmares. But everything that will happen, witnessed by the women defenders of the basin, such as Verónica Chavez, a community member from Santuario Tres Pozos (Jujuy), by the very sight of the llamas, by the presence of the cacti and the eyes of water, will be unforeseen, painful, as in a catastrophe.

“We thought that just by replacing oil and gas (fossil fuels) with clean energy (such as lithium and solar panels) we were already on a green planet living as we always have. But this transition does not come with a manual of answers,” says researcher Maristella Svampa, a member of the collective Mirá socioambiental. “We have the voice of the people of the south and the energy transition has to be the opportunity for us to rethink the energy system thus far concentrated in large corporations, which has generated energy poverty and inequality. We need an energy system based on solidarity that implies, above all, a different link with nature.”

We have discussed the “soft rock” before, the one that excites capitalism so much, tempers psychotic excitements and could calm the corporations that go to these locations to do their business in order to save themselves, where previously they led us to another mirage with oil. Lithium could temper the bipolar population in the throes of battery mania, memories deposited in their phones, or the surge of depression when their toys break and they are left crying like children. There are also the indigenous peoples who have access to some technology but still store most of their memories by talking to their ancestors in the ambient-world of the high Andean wetlands of the Puna.

I previously stated that life, since “the primitive soup”, made its way in different expressions and human living beings, always so intense, are only one among the species. Let us listen to what the rest of the living beings say here in the Salinas Grandes, in the style of Uexküll, the naturalist metaphysician, or Krenak, who never interrupted that inter-species conversation with the bodies of water when their “veins” are broken, in this case those of the basin, for the extraction of lithium. These vibrant matters, “non-things”, will have some fainter voices, some annoying ones, like Kachi, Halita, salt, the root of Salarium, which was a symbolic good, a medium of exchange. Salt and salty, expanse of white beauty that withstands a few cuts here and there in the salt blocks for their terrestrial companions. The hills, the Apu, naked of plants that sees its surrounding world all mapped out, the landscape manhandled, in dispute of the mining belongings, all live in its skirt and under the guardianship of the communities. Laughter echoes on its slope because they say in assembly that the environmental lawyers are going to take a mountain to court; don’t laugh because its spirit is going.

Now let’s talk about Nature as a subject of rights, but above all about lithium and its right to remain in the rich soup. The mystery of lithium, that cosmic waste, the supposed saviour in the energy transition for a post-fossil world that never arrives. And the mining companies of the north who, on arrival, come up against the guardians of the puna, full of cosmic visions. Also of the intelligence of the mineral kingdom, of the chemical code of lithium that retains the energy memory but also of mirages, of consumption, of capitalist voracity. Of the commons. Let us talk about the water and the desertification of the surrounding territories. Let’s talk about a world that is excited about staying the same. And about Verónica, the community member, who greets Pacha in the morning and asks Mamita Salina for help in the afternoon so that the mining companies don’t come.

Some disobediences infiltrate this global panorama of climate disaster: the struggles in the territories and political self-organisation, environmental lawyers such as Alicia Chalabe and Enrique Viale, but also some imaginative figurations that emerge such as the Pacha film made by Tomás Saraceno and Maxi Laina that began to form in 2020 in Jujuy during the project Fly with Aerocene Pacha and Aerocene’s aerosolar sculptures, which already traveled through Bolivia and Argentina, and we saw rising together with the communities this past January 2023. They are designs that speculate on different flights above and below the earth. Flights without fossil fuels that do not extract lithium from the salt flats. They are signs of possible futures, warning beacons, and ignited imaginations. Aerocene is a poetic tool and questions the technical destiny of humanity. Art, like literature, builds sensitive bridges to inhabit more complex worlds and ask ourselves whether we will be slaves to the instructions of this anthropocentric civilisation or free to speculate a different, interspecies, cosmic, communal flight. As Ursula K Le Guin said: “Resistance and change often begin with art”.

I told you that the eye that looks at the beauty of the sky in turn looks within the eye that is stardust and extends outwards to configure the picture of the world. At some point we will have to look into the picture of the world and the dark side of this electric civilisation that is now coming for lithium.

The race to control the supply chain of what we now know as critical minerals, or minerals for the energy transition, marks a new chapter in the global geopolitical dispute. In the wake of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which demonstrated the vulnerability of supply chains, countries in North America, Europe and Asia, particularly China, are competing not only to dominate the technologies of the final products, but also for access to the deposits of these minerals, which are currently central to energy storage, as in the case of batteries for electric cars. In the context of the climate crisis, these products could reduce dependence on fossil fuels if the supporting infrastructure is in place and they are supplied by renewable sources.

Countries such as Argentina, which together with Bolivia and Chile have around 60% of lithium reserves in brine, see this interest in lithium as a window of opportunities to attract investment, particularly in a context of high prices. To a much lesser extent, they seek to underpin processes linked to the development of battery parts in the country. However, they pay little attention to the values of the ecosystems in which lithium is found or to the way of life of the communities that have lived there for hundreds of years.

Argentina is currently the world’s fourth largest producer of this mineral and has approximately 50 projects in different phases. Focusing on the generation of foreign exchange required to repay the foreign debt, provincial and central governments prioritise these investments over complex but necessary hydrological studies to determine whether the operations can be realised without irreversible damage to the environment. This is particularly worrying in an extremely fragile region, where water is the scarce commodity that defines survival; its availability and quality could be seriously altered by the impacts of lithium mining, which has been considered true water mega-mining because of the volumes demanded in its processes.

The environmental management and policy tools designed to identify environmental impacts in order to prevent them are either not applied, such as the strategic environmental assessment, or are poorly applied, as mere formalisms, as is the case with the environmental impact assessment process. These processes are not undertaken from a holistic perspective that takes into account the whole basin – they are, instead, circumscribed to limited geographical areas – and do not integrate pre-existing water uses from other economic activities, nor those necessary for the life of communities and biodiversity in these areas. Lastly, they do not have a solid environmental framework, nor do they consider the cumulative or synergistic impact of ongoing or planned operations.

Information about the environment is not shared with the public, nor is there sufficient time invested to comply with the right to free, prior and informed consent, which requires time to communicate with the communities so they can understand the consequences of lithium extraction and the impact it has on their lives and culture, and give their consent when necessary.

As a result, communities such as those found in Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc have been resisting and defending their territory and rights for over twelve years.

Furthermore, lithium mining is promoted as the solution to climate change, ignoring the evidence that, in fact, the wetlands in which it is intended to be extracted, have a tremendous potential to contribute to the mitigation and adaptation of biodiversity and people to climate change. For example, micro-organisms that exist in these wetlands, have the capacity to capture and store carbon dioxide, while their degradation could lead to the release of greenhouse gases stored within them.

Considering lithium as an exportable commodity instead of solving the foreign exchange problem will most likely reinforce this problem by generating a new phase of dependent development, buying more expensive products such as possible electric cars. This leads to further problems regarding payment balances and the perpetuation of debt cycles, reinforcing once again the vicious cycle of exploiting nature to repay debt.

The loss of valuable biodiversity, traditions, Andean knowledges and cultures not only transforms these territories into sacrifice zones for the hyper-consumerist model of the global North, which does not seek to reduce its demand for minerals and nature, but also reinforces existing inequalities and blocks the possibilities of considering a paradigm shift that prioritizes the lives of people and ecosystems, and teaches us to live within the limits of our planet.

“For the Communities of the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin, Buen Vivir (Good Living) is the process of community life in fullness in our territory. It is being oneself with the community from its own roots. Achieving Buen Vivir implies knowing how to live and then knowing how to live together.”

This document contains the work completed in the territories of the communities of the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin. We have organised this document in order to build a path of resistance and political action using our own lives within a challenging context – due to current frameworks and policies that are functional to dispossession – in a horizon for Good Living “Sumak Kawsay”, in which our actions are proposed as tools, strategies, production and revaluation of ancestral knowledge and experience. They are political-organisational alternatives that have their greatness in their communal realisation and their power in perseverance. This is different from the reality that is presented to us in development models and plans that do not dialogue with what we are: that do not take into account the history and realities of our community, and our needs and potential.

Faced with this common reality, in our meetings, assemblies, gatherings, community workshops, debates, reflections and political struggles, we have created a proposal to develop a Free, Prior and Informed Consent and Consultation Procedure for our Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc. This is in accordance with the current legal framework in Argentina, especially Article 75, paragraph 17 of the National Constitution, ILO Convention 169 – National Law No. 24071 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The aim of this document is to present the path we have taken to confront the territorial conflicts that we are experiencing in our region; proposals that go in a different direction from our Andean cosmovision, threatening the balance of the Pachamama. We believe in participation and consultation as mechanisms for the creation of integral and community policies. (…)

Why do we call it Kachi Yupi?

We created this document once we reached a consensus, following many discussions and debates. We consider this to be a tool for our community for defending our rights, families, culture, identity and our Pachamama. We have agreed that this is only our first step forward, a very important one and one that has cost us a lot of work, but this is not definitive or ever-lasting, because the process in our communities is constantly changing and/or evolving. We believe that over time and as conditions change, we will make adjustments, updates and improvements so that it can function as the tool we imagined and conceived it to be, and in this way, add to the communities that are like-minded to this document.

Why do we think of salt footprints? Because this document is rooted in the deepest part of our identity, in the heritage of our grandfathers and grandmothers, in the vestiges of their struggle for our territory, in the signs left by their feet, in the marks left by history, in the traces of their learning and knowledge, in the deep and lasting impression of their culture.

In turn, a footprint represents a path to follow, a guide for the passing of people and animals, a furrow along which we must follow. In this document we intend to provide a footprint, as a community conduit, through which we channel our right to participation, consultation and free, prior and informed consent. In this way, we continue our ancestors’ legacy of defending the lands and territories to which we are intimately connected.

How do we elaborate Kachi Yupi?

In our lives as part of a community, we are used to performing different tasks known as “minka”, that is, a shared work in which we all join our efforts to benefit the community or one of its members. This is how we prepared this document, in a communal and joint process, agreed upon by all the actors in our communities. (…)

The first step was to agree on what the objectives were going to be and we defined a general one in assembly (…):

• To analyse the international standards of the right to participation, consultation and free, prior and informed consent, progressing in the definition of common criteria and specific provisions, and providing elements for the elaboration of a possible document/protocol for special consultation for these communities.

In order to achieve this objective, we also consider the following to be necessary:

• Continue the process of communication between the communities of the Assembly of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc in order to agree on joint work strategies to strengthen the struggle for the respect of indigenous rights.
• Strengthen basic knowledge in relation to Indigenous Law and the right to participation, consultation and free, prior and informed consent in particular, as tools to demand the effective application of the rights of indigenous peoples recognised at the constitutional level and in international treaties (and concordant ones).
• To learn about the experiences of other indigenous communities in the struggle for the respect of their fundamental rights, especially the right to consultation, analysing the actions implemented and proposing other measures to improve them.

Given that we are the only ones that could define the contents of Kachi Yupi, (due to our customary law, cosmovision, culture and context), we held various meetings in the communities’ territories. Each meeting held at Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc defined concepts and criteria throughout 2014 and part of 2015. (…)

As we progressed we were detecting and recording the similarities and agreements of the different communities. We presented every difference that surfaced in meetings, so we could discuss them and reach an agreement. (…)

Lastly, in a general assembly with all the communities of the Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, the document called “KACHI YUPI – SALT FOOTPRINTS / PROCEDURE OF CONSULTATION AND PRIOR FREE AND INFORMED CONSENT FOR THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES OF SALINAS GRANDES AND LAGUNA DE GUAYATAYOC”, was approved. Kachi Yupi collects the conclusions of the whole process, from an indigenous perspective.

(…)

Our culture / development model

In a press release issued by the Indigenous Peoples’ Committee of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guyatayoc on 11th of March 2011, we stated:

“… during the past year, we have begun to be silent witnesses of a new activity in the region, nobody has informed us of anything despite the rights that require us to be consulted (National Constitution, Article 6 of ILO Convention 169). We found out through rumours and the media that lithium had been discovered in the subsoil of the salt flats of the Puna of Salta and Jujuy. All the announcements made by the government spoke of the importance of this new venture for the national and international economy. However, no one said anything about how this new exploitation could affect the communities and our territory: the salt flats, the springs, the pastures, our livestock, the Pacha, our customs and beliefs, and so on. In short: our whole life…”.

(…) As members of Andean cultures, we seek Buen Vivir rather than strategic development or individualistic economic growth. This is only possible if there is a harmonious relationship with Pachamama, if participation is strengthened, if identity and cultural diversity are protected, and if we regain control of our territories and our lives. Our model seeks to create conditions for a harmonious and happy life. Following this logic, it is not possible to take a partial view – but a holistic one. “Pacha” is space, time, matter, spirit and also transcendental projections. Moreover, human life has meaning as long as it develops together with others. From this philosophical and spiritual framework, the indigenous communities of the Basin territory uphold a concept of development related to our deep sense of identity.

Our Communities and the Salt Flats

(…) Many of us work or have worked in the salt flats (…). The salt flats as they are known are part of our culture and identity.

From this perspective, salt is not an economic resource, but a “living being”: it has a blooming cycle, just like sowing. In the months of October and November of each year, the “sowing” takes place through the construction of pools; fro

m December until February – rainy season – the salt is “raised” in the pools; the “harvest” takes place from March until May; from this month the salt is transported to the facilities where it is fractionated for its commercialization. In August, asking for a good year for the salt and our territories, an offering is made to Pachamama, always in the same place, with the offering of coca leaves, food, drinks and the “sahumada” with coba. This is how the salt cycle is renewed, with a periodicity identical to the agrarian phases of the Quebrada, Puna and the Andes. The production is full of rituals, practices and secrets that reproduce a cultural identity pre-existing the State.

The communities hold a wealth of knowledge regarding the use of salt learned from the elders, such as the recognition of different types of salt (as food for human beings, for animals and medicine for different ailments) (…) The rational management of salt has been an ancestral conception of the communities, avoiding its uncontrolled extraction. (…)

There is also an affectionate, family-like relationship with the whole environment. Wild animals such as the puma or the fox give us signs of what the year will be like, whether it will be rainy or dry. Through their blooming, the wild plants warn us what the weather will be like. The weather itself is a family, it is common to hear that the hailstorm punished some crops and not others, because “it has its way”. This spiritual relationship with the natural environment must be respected, and any intervention must be done in conversation and respect for this culture.

The organisation of Communities in the territory

Although each indigenous community in the Basin has its own structure, in 2010, when faced with the advance of lithium mining companies, we began a process of coordination and uniting in order to address the implications of the activity. The emerging organisation led to the creation of the Assembly of Communities, which meets monthly to discuss different issues related to problems in the community, as well as a space to share our reflections and spiritually. (…)

Each Committee meeting is held in different communities within the territory of the Basin. This is where we reflect, learn from each other and decide the next steps that should be taken. (…)

We have also established a Mesa Chica, an executive and coordinating body that will make decisions, composed of fifteen people from different communities in the five areas of the Basin territory: Route 11, Route 52, Route 79, Tumbaya Department and Route 75 (see map). From these spaces we have taken on the commitment to defend our territory and the community rights of indigenous peoples.

(…)

The salt process / the consultation process

 

In accordance with our cultural identity and the reality of our community, and given that many of our communities live, work and interact with the salt, we have chosen to exemplify it as a characteristic of our identity and relationship with the Salinas Grandes.

SALT HARVEST	CONSULTATION PROCESS
Preparation of Tools Before harvesting the salt, the working tools are prepared: shovels, pickaxes, axes, barges, quelaya (black) goggles and canvas bags. ood and drinks are also prepared to challar the tools. These consist of chicha, alcohol for yerbiau, piri and tijtincha. The challada ceremony is held in a sacred place where it will always remain for future generations. During the challada, the tools and the workers are covered with coa-coa, coloured wool and their hands and feet are placed crosswise so that they are not caught by the soil and so that the work is successful. Nowadays the work is undertaken with the intervention of machinery and hand tools are also still used.	Preparatory stage From a community perspective, it aims to train and acquire knowledge in the defense of rights, the existence of the protocol and its validity, and the implementation of strengthening and organizational mechanisms. This should be an ongoing task. Regarding the rest of society, it refers to the creation of strategies so that the State and companies recognise the protocol (a form of publicity for the project, actions, and places) and how to implement it, i.e. promoting of the document itself.
Construction of pools  Like in all Andean activities, the challada is also held at this stage. Then places where the pools will be built are looked for; this must be a clean place where not too much mud can enter. The dimensions of the pools are 4 x 2 m, with a depth of 60 cm and a water height of 30 cm. For the construction, the salt is broken towards the contour of the measurements with a pickaxe, an axe and a chisel, and the dirty part is removed from the pools and left at the side. Nowadays it is realized with a backhoe machine, and the measurements are 10m x 1m, with a depth of 60 cm and a water height of 30 cm. A salt cutter is used to cut along the contour of the measurement, and then the first piece of rubble is removed by hand so that the machine can work on it later. Once all the rubble has been removed with the machine, the pools are manually aligned and leveled.	Design of the Process This would imply a first contact or meeting with representatives of the government, the company and the community (through the Assembly of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc Basin). Considering the project or specific measures includes the identification of the relationship between the actions of the project exposed to consultation and the rights that it will affect for us. It would culminate in the Assembly whose objective is to approve the design of the consultation process by answering a series of questions, applying the protocol to the specific case: how it will be, when it starts, where and who will participate in each stage. This is when the date of the next assembly would be defined, in which the actual consultation will begin.
Salt blooming  When it rains in the summer, the salt flats fill with water, and with evaporation, the salt is reared again. We call this the breeding or sowing, which has its own process until it blooms and ripens. The tata INTI helps in all that refers to the breeding, as well as the Wayra (wind) who with its breath mixes the Yacu (water) on one side so that the water slides through the whole salt flat and therefore the Kachi (salt) blooms everywhere.	Development of the process In compliance with the agreements of the previous stage, the consultation process begins to develop in assemblies with the presentation of information to the communities (research, development and exploitation of the activity, impacts, benefits, disadvantages and consequences). The aim is to provide a solid basis of information for a later stage of decision making. A thorough understanding of the project and its impacts by all members of the community is important in order to make responsible decisions. Once the community understands that it has sufficient information, and understands the information provided, it will move on to the next stage.
Salt crystallization Once the pools have been built, the salt is left to mature for a year, and then it is harvested.	Maturation of the decision The proposal involves an internal period of reflection and refinement. And an external period, in which doubts or requirements, requests for new information, extension of time or clarification will be presented. The objective is to make a decision with thorough knowledge, responsibility and decisiveness.
Salt harvest When it is ready to be harvested, we once again prepare for the challada and the thanksgiving to Pacha for the new production of KACHI (salt). There are three harvesting techniques: 1- Manually, from pools until all the salt is crumbled, which is washed with the same water that comes out of the excavation, then the granulated salt is removed from the sides of the pools. The unoccupied pools are swept and squared for rearing. 2- Another form of harvesting is the salt loaves, which first of all consists of looking for the banks (fractioned spaces demarcated by what the locals call “veins”). First of all, an opening is created beginning with the veins, where a sample is taken to discover if the salt is good (even). Then, 30 cm wide and 4 to 6 metres long are marked from the veins, depending on the length of the bank. Afterwards, a straight line is marked out along this line, which is then axed until the cut is opened, aided by the use of crowbars. Lastly, the loaves are cut into 25 x 30 cm pieces, and then they are stacked and ready to be loaded onto donkeys or into lorries. 3- Granulated salt or soft salt consists of sweeping the grain salt with a shovel. This grain salt is put in piles to be bagged in 50 kg bags and then sold on the market.	Decision making At this stage, the decision will be taken and the necessary agreements and guarantees will be established. In case of an affirmative agreement, the objective is to participate  in the development of the activity. If the outcome is negative, an agreement of respect for the process and decision is also celebrated, as well as a guarantee of respect for the decision.
Salt drying It consists of removing the salt from the pools and placing it to one side, and leaving it to dry for a month. When done with a backhoe machine, the salt is left on the side of the pools and spread out for faster drying, considering the quantity harvested is greater.	Follow-up of the procedure This stage will include regular meetings, evaluations and monitoring of all steps in the activity. The objective is to keep the community present at all times as part of the process and its continuity.

 

THESE ARE FRAGMENTS OF “KACHI YUPI – HUELLAS DE SAL”, BY THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES OF SALINAS GRANDES AND LAGUNA DE GUAYATAYOC. TO READ THE FULL KACHI YUPI IN SPANISH SCAN THIS QR CODE: