Dagmara Wyskiel: The Lightness of Lithium

Curator: Małgorzata Kaźmierczak

The first part of Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America is entitled “Mankind’s Poverty as a Consequence of the Wealth of the Land”, part two “Development is a Voyage with More Shipwrecks than Navigators”. The Uruguayan journalist wrote these words in the 1970s, but it is not difficult to relate them to the current relationship between the north and south of the world. The wealth of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia is lithium – a soft, silvery-white alkaline metal once used to make heat-resistant glass, lubricants and also medicines for bipolar disorder. (Probably because of this latter use, Lithium is the title of a song by Nirvana.)

The countries of the so-called lithium triangle are in possession of more than half of the world’s reserves of the element, which in the 21st century has become an object of desire, a ‘white gold’ due to its high energy density and use in the production of batteries for electric cars. This is where it is produced so that Europeans enjoy clean air. Electromobility is the perfect combination of green technology and big business. Eliminating combustion cars is supposed to save the planet. The problem is that it won’t save the whole thing. In Chile, electric car sales currently account for around 0.5%. “Development is a Voyage with More Shipwrecks than Navigators”. Green colonisation, with the US and China playing a major role, is a reality.  

Lithium is being mined in various ways. In the lithium triangle, it is extracted by evaporating water from vast salt pans. This uses more than 2 million litres of water per tonne of raw material, all in the driest place on earth. Industrial extraction of lithium in Chile’s Atacama Desert salt plains, leads to groundwater loss, soil degradation and cuts off local communities from already scarce drinking water supplies. The indigenous people of the land do not have bureaucratic, documented ‘legal titles’ to it, but consider it a sacred feeder. This is why on 1 August – Pachamama (Mother Earth) Day – the people of the Jujuy area of Argentina staged a protest called el Tercer Malon de la Paz – referring to similar protests by indigenous peoples in 1946 and 2006. In 2023, more than 1,000 representatives of 400 different indigenous communities gathered outside Congress in Buenos Aires after Gerardo Morales – the governor of Jujuy – amended the local constitution in June of that year restricting their right to protest and allowing the removal of anyone who does not have legal title to the land they occupy. “It is the Pachamama that is the guarantor of life, so we will defend it to the end,” said Nestor Jerez – leader of the Ocloya community. Jujuy Arde – Jujuy is on fire – travestied the well-known 1968 slogan of the Tucuman Arde art group.

Dagmara Wyskiel – is a Cracovian and has lived in Chile, in Antofagasta, for 20-some years. She has selected four films for the exhibition at Podbrzezie Gallery. The first, Trial and Error, takes us to the place from which lithium is extracted, the sacred land of the Incan Pachamama, where every component of nature has a life of its own. The next two films are a diptych, an improvised philosophical conversation between two boys. In the lunar landscape of Antofagasta, they discuss childhood and parents, growing up, death, the immortality of the soul, basic human needs, time, the differences between men and women, the infinity of the world and its beginning. The films show an industrial landscape and a specific nature in which it takes a lot of sensitivity to recognize life. The last film is a wartime memoir of the artist’s aunt’s childhood, speaks of imperialisms and the land experienced by them, as well as universal family ties, especially between mother and daughter. The films are shown in an installation created using lithium. On black fabric, lithium salt creates an image suggestive of the cosmos. The element, which was supposedly one of the first to appear after the Big Bang, is hidden from Western man for the day, although ubiquitous. 

The title of the exhibition brings to mind the title of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  Individual decisions there have no meaning, they are light. This lack of meaning, this lightness, becomes unbearable. Unbearable, like the awareness of how ‘white gold’ contributes to mankind’s poverty.

Dagmara Wyskiel graduated in Industrial Design and did her doctorate at the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. She has been living in Chile since 2001. Co-founder and artistic director of the SACO International Contemporary Art Biennial. She realised large-scale actions in the Valley of Meteorites in the Atacama Desert, at the ALMA astronomical observatory, on the shores of Lake Amargo in the Strait of Magellan and Chilean Antarctica region, in the Kazimierz district of Krakow and in the port of Valparaiso. She has made several interventions on salt lakes in the Argentine Andes; in public spaces in Manizales, Medellín and Bogotá, Colombia; on the steps of the presidential palace of La Paz, Bolivia; in London and Hastings, England; in Antofagasta, Coliumo and Castro, Chile. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Bolivia, the Center for Contemporary Art in Montevideo, Uruguay, twice at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago de Chile, as well as in the United States, Spain, Poland and in group exhibitions in China, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia and Argentina and her films have been awarded at many festivals. She is the winner of the Grand Prize at the 17th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh, 2016.

The exhibition Lighness of Lithium at Galeria Podbrzezie (Kraków), November 10th-December 8th, 2023.