View more
Gonzalo Valiente Oriol of Grandeza Studio
“Lithium Triangle” (LT) refers to a vast territorial demarcation across three neighbouring South American nations: Chile, Bolivia and Argentina. Its approximate 400,000 square kilometres area is believed to host between 60 and 80 per cent of the world’s known deposits of lithium, a light metal with extraordinary electric storage qualities, declared crucial to the successful staging of what we know as an “Energy Transition” away from Fossil Fuels. However, increased international interest in mass-extracting the region’s deposits to allegedly preserve life on Earth threatens to destabilise its fragile hydric balance. This could trigger a concatenation of catastrophic consequences for regional life at all levels. Paradoxically, a territory framed as a “promised land” for the deployment of a “green” paradigm must become a “sacrifice zone” to fulfil the Energy Transition’s life-saving agendas.
What would our “lost” cultures and ecosystems say about current climate-action agendas? Can absences speak and imagine? Can necro-perspectives trigger and support life preservation agendas? What should we bury? What would you unearth? What must go? What infrastructures (if any)? What symbols (if any)? What languages? What territories? What losses? What gains?
The studio aims to support and develop students’ critical and speculative skills and their capacity to articulate solid connections between critical thinking and political and spatial imagination.
