Before Air There Was Water/ Antes del aire hubo agua

The Atacama salt plain, once an ancient inland sea ringed by volcanos is now one of the driest deserts in the world, where the salty crust and the lithium-rich underground brine waters recalls it’s deep-time past as a sea.

This work is a consideration of this site of watery contest; between mining and environment, where natural groundwater needed for the survival of the unique ecosystem is increasingly extracted for lithium to help the global North’s energy transition towards a critically necessary carbon-free future. A storytelling of a peripheral and remote place, but at the same time one that stands in for so many peripheral and natural sites where ecosystem resources are demanded for human needs. A storytelling that encompasses the complexity of decision making at the end-Holocene.
This is a story with three players; of the natural unique salt water lagoons at threat from groundwater mining, where water is pumped into shallow ponds to evaporate. Of the cyanobacteria evolved to live in these hypersaline waters, drawing down CO2 and making oxygen from sunlight alone- metabolically linked to the first bacteria in the first ocean before complex life, making the first oxygen for the first breathable atmosphere- that time when before air there was only water. And of the flamingos that survive on brine-shrimp fed by these bacteria; their feathers tinged pink from cyanobacterial pigments.

This dual-screen video is part of a 4-video installation commissioned for the SACO Biennale 2023. The research for this work was supported by Create Australia and The Creative Industries Fund NL. Scientific support from the Joint Research Centre for Science (EU JRC) and University of Antofagasta.