Environmental semiotics

In the race for the ‘underground frontier’, the Atacama Desert is a unique planetary attractor. Due to its mineral riches, it has been systematically destroyed by the multiple cycles of mining that have ravaged the desert since colonisation, from silver and gold, to nitrates, copper and now lithium. With each mining boom come new forms of land appropriation, new forms of environmental destruction, and new forms of violence towards the peoples and beings of the desert. Biologist Lynn Margulis argues that instead of competition, it is alliance and symbiosis that are at the heart of creative evolution. Environmental semiotics allows us to trace some of these shifting relations of coexistence. The pink colour that permeates the installation is one such semiotic register, moving from mineral to bacteria, from there to algae and ultimately to the feathers of flamingos. The colour is a marker for material relations of coexistence.

Interviews

Symbiosis, affinity and unnatural alliances are the topics of the multi-screen installation emerging from work by the Lithium Triangle Studio as part of the MA Environmental Architecture, Royal College of Art, London, and its collaboration with the Atacama Desert Foundation in Chile. Interviews with Alonso Barros, Cristina Dorador and Rolando Humire look at the pressure of extractivism over different ecologies of existence in the Atacama.

Soundtrack and animation

Musician Nicolás Jaar contributes a speculative soundscape recreating the elusive ‘voices’ of bacteria that can be heard at moments of drastic temperature shifts in Salar de Llamara. At the centre of the intervention is an animation in which Mingxin Li explores the unique stromatolites – sedimentary rocks produced over 3.5 billion years by the accumulation of layer upon layer of cyanobacteria – as monumental environmental architectures.