A collaboration with Chilean artist and researcher Isidora Correa.
STRATA / ESTRATA
Three-channel video installation: video projection and 55″ LCD screens / Three-channel video installation: video projection and 55″ LCD screens
Duration: 14 min.
SACO Biennial: Dark Ecosystems / SACO Biennial: Dark Ecosystems
La Molinera, Antofagasta, Chile, 2025
STRATA offers a critical reading of the so-called “sustainable” energy transition through its material traces, situating the Atacama Salt Flat as a territory where historical, geological, and biopolitical layers sustaining lithium extraction become visible. The project conceives the landscape as an archive in continuous sedimentation, where each stratum—mineral, biological, and industrial—operates as a force of friction between deep time and historical experience.
The work proposes a critical reading of the “sustainable” energy transition based on its material traces, situating the Atacama Salt Flat as a territory where historical, geological, and biopolitical layers that underpin lithium extraction become visible.
The multi-channel video installation—comprising two LCD screens and a projector—presents field recordings made in the salt flat. Lithium brine evaporation ponds and saline formations associated with bacterial activity are interwoven with a soundscape that combines ambient recordings and data sonification: thermal crackles of the salt crust, wind currents, resonances of extraction operations, and the sonic representation of the volumes of lithium brine extracted over the past seven years. Images and sounds overlap and collide like shock movements between mining dynamics and conservation zones, exposing the relationships of dependence and resistance that shape these ecosystems under intensive extraction of water resources.
ESTRATA thus proposes a situated experience that invites us to rethink the salt flat as a stratified body that condenses mineral and biological memories of some of the oldest life forms on the planet, which negotiate their permanence in a territory strained by the promise of a “sustainable” energy future.
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MICRO MINING ECOLOGIES / ECOLOGÍAS MICRO MINERALES
Video projection, glass sculptures with biological processes, webcams, and speakers / Videoproyección, esculturas de vidrio con procesos biologías, cámaras web y parlantes.
Video duration: 11 min. 34 sec. / Video duration: 11 min 34 sec.
Semibreve Festival / Semibreve Festival
Gnration, Braga, Portugal, 2025
Extremo-Philia: Micro-mining ecologies is a transdisciplinary bio-art project that explores the frictions between extremophile microorganisms and extractive lithium industries through sonic inquiries based on bacterial growth. Rooted in field research conducted in the Atacama Salt Flat in Chile–one of the driest and most mineral-rich ecosystems on Earth–the work addresses the ecological impacts of lithium extraction and the intrinsic contradictions of the so-called “green” energy transition, in which invisible life forms are displaced and erased under sustainable narratives of decarbonization.
The project focuses on the diversity of microbial mats: layered bacterial consortia that exemplify cooperative survival strategies developed over deep time. As living archives and contemporary ancestors of Earth’s earliest lifeforms, they embody biochemical intelligence and a poetics of resistance. Yet, these fragile ecologies are increasingly disrupted by intensive water extraction for lithium processing, resulting in hydrological imbalance and the progressive disappearance of unique habitats under the pressure of the new mineral paradigm.
By raising the question of how to listen to these imperceptible organisms impacted by extractive industries, and by proposing alternatives for mineral recirculation to mitigate damage, the research integrates scientific processes, ecological inquiry and sensory media through video and sound. A time-lapse video documents the expansion, contraction and pattern formation of microbial cultures sampled from the Salt Flat. The resulting footage makes visible the diversity and dynamics of extremophile bacteria transforming the act of imaging into a form of care and preservation.
A bio-reactive sculptural system composed of hand-blown glass sculptures modeled after the salt crust morphologies of the Atacama Salt Flat, host an active bioleaching system, in which extremophile bacteria metabolize lithium from discarded cellphone batteries
The metabolic activity of these living agents is captured through an interactive sonification system, where real-time color tracking translates data from the bioleaching process into generative sound, composing an evolving sonic landscape of mineral recirculation.
Through the use of exploratory practices using computerVision algorithms, and data mapping techniques, the project aims to make audible these life patterns of the extremophile bacteria, allowing a look into different time scales and morphisms.
Extremo-Philia enacts a relational ecology in which living organism and technological systems, are mutually implicated, co-creating a sensing apparatus based on responsiveness. As a practice-based contribution to bio-art and sound studies, the project foregrounds living systems as epistemic partners and agents for multispecies translation, creating the conditions for sensing more-than-human worlds and positioning microbial life as central to planetary health and cycling.