Triangle of Sacrifice

Since 2020 we conducted the artistic research Wak’a, we have explored the relationship between two deposits, sacred territories or deities for the Andean inhabitants. The Cerro Rico de Potosi, a 500-year-old silver mine, to which the beginning of globalization is attributed, and the Salar de Uyuni, the largest lithium reserve in the world. We explore the relationship between sacred territory and sacrifice. Silver mining sacrificed the population and the territory, 500 years later history repeats itself with lithium in a global context called anthropocene. We conceive the Lithium Triangle as a single territory that shares the ecosystem of the salt flats and the volcanic puna, avoiding fragmentation due to its political division into three countries: Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. The race for energy transition and electromobility will profoundly affect this territory, considered a Sacrifice Zone.

The Lithium Triangle concentrates 60% of world’s lithium. The UN General Assembly approved the 2030-2050 agenda, which among its most urgent points promotes energy transition and electromobility. Lithium is a strategic resource for achieving these objectives.
Transnational capital and geopolitical interests have strained the Triangle; the legal term sacrifice zone is attributed to a geographic region that is subject to environmental damage or low-income and racialized communities that endure environmental damage related to pollution, toxic waste and heavy industry. Lithium is linked to clean energy, but it is clean in countries of the global north, while in the south it generates harm to humans, non-humans and more than humans.
We seek to unveil the discourse of greenwashing and denounce the neo- extractivism that impacts on the bodies of the global south.

The Triangle of Sacrifice is a device that bears witness to the impact of large-scale lithium extraction. Two million liters of water are needed to produce one ton of lithium carbonate. The transnationals use fossil water from the glaciers, wetlands and watersheds of this desert. The water cannot be reused after the evaporation process. The work expresses the process of deterioration of the sacrifice zone.