White Gold
Lithium is the material that batteries are made from, the mineral basis of many decarbonisation initiatives. Bolivia contains the largest deposit of lithium in the world, but attempts to extract it in an equitable way have been attacked or delayed.
This ongoing project seeks to uncover the ways that geology, as a colonial science, structures land and the lives of those who inhabit it. It looks at how modes of expropriation and territorialisation — enabled by the geological gaze — continue to permeate attempts at postcolonial resource autonomy. In doing so, it uncovers the ways that the expanded realm of extractive practices manufactures inhumanity through establishing both lives and minerals as exhaustable matter.
Total Battery Teardown (22:58) is a video essay introducing the current situation around lithium in Bolivia, and sketching out a theory of extraction (get in touch if you want to see it). White Gold: Lithium and Power is an ongoing work, a wide-ranging study of the politics of lithium in the region, using the format of a geological survey.