Al amparo del Río

The defence of life rises with the care of the aquifers, among women, communities, and volcanoes. This project works with the memories of the people who live in Antofagasta de la Sierra, where the first lithium project in Argentina was installed.

Al Amparo del Río: lithium and resistance in the Puna of Catamarca, comes from a territory on the radar of extractivist mining. Its salt flats full of 'lithium' are at the centre of territorial disputes in the south of Abya Yala, our Latin America, since 85% of the world's reserves of this mineral are located in the so-called 'lithium triangle', made up of Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. Transnational companies and the powers competing for the energy transition market, claim that this mining is green, they repeat that it is sustainable, while communities denounce the indiscriminate use of water for the projects. It is estimated that for every tonne of lithium extracted, around two million litres of water evaporate.

This project from Colectivo Pliegues is the result of a process of working with the memories of the people who live in and around the town of Antofagasta de la Sierra, where the first lithium project in Argentina was installed. We undertook journeys in which we recorded images of the indigenous community defending their territory, breeding, grazing, water furrows and the mining company. In this way, we subtly focus on the territories traversed by Spanish colonisation and the resistances that are being woven into a new stage of capitalist and colonial expansion in the global South.

We write and photograph. In the face of the money that flows and the land that leaves. The defence of life rises with the care of the aquifers, among women, communities, families and volcanoes. Our cameras and voice recorders, were tools for taking testimonies, they allowed us to work with images and words others than those that circulate massively in the hegemonic media, they allowed us to pay attention to relationships beyond the landscape and to find what is not said aloud but circulates as a murmur. What is protected when you resist?

In this project, memories sprout around what is protected, in the watering of the beans, in the care of the sheep, in the smoke that is lit to scare away the new plundering of the land.

Photographs and fragments of more than 30 interviews, field diaries, notes and murmurs from journeys that began in 2020 are part of this work, which is framed in the accompaniment of the Atacameños del Altiplano community and the visibility of a socio-environmental conflict that is still latent: the extraction of lithium in the territories of the indigenous communities that inhabit the Andean salt flats of Latin America.

A project of Colectivo Pliegues: Débora Cerutti, Guadalupe Scotta and Sofía Bensadon
We are oral history collectors and image makers. Our backgrounds are photography, journalism, research and anthropology.