ed to the mine I noticed something above me.

High on a nearby mountain were a set of white crosses.

A man told me that the children of the nearby mining town were buried there.

Because of the terrain their bodies couldn’t be brought home.

I watched them for a long time.

Small white crosses far above us..

On that empty hill above the clouds.

I continued north. To where lithium and copper excavation starts in earnest.

To a desert without water or clouds.

El Teniente is 2,300 feet above sea level.

The Atacama is 13,000 feet. It is without water. It is without ozone.

It is the closest I have been to the sky.

Context for the following pictures:

-Dogs -

In Calama I read a newspaper story about a pack of stray dogs killing and eating a young boy.

Shortly afterwards I was attacked by a pack of dogs
while taking the following photograph.

-Woman in Red -

During the Pinochet dictatorship over 1000 people were disappeared by the regime.

This woman’s son was taken.

-Pictures from a mine in the snow -
In 1945 a fire started in Teniente. 355 people died. The cause was asphyxiation. La Tragedia del Humo.

The Tragedy of Smoke

- Pictures of ruins with guard towers -

Many abandoned mining towns ended up as internment camps during the Pinochet dictatorship of the 1970s.

A short essay on Sustainability:

Lejania in Spanish means the quality of something to be far away.

To feel a great distance from something.

The scope of globalization has made the consequences of even well intentioned political decisions complex and opaque as they travel down the supply chain. This project is about the entropy that grows as we move down these structures. As we reach the roots life becomes chaotic.

This is where the copper that runs in the walls of your house is found. This is where the lithium in a Tesla comes from. The batteries in your phone. From here. From billion dollar contracts and relationships that were written under the Pinochet regime and came at the cost of great suffering. This is the sad heart of many of the trade relationships that exist in the world today.

The paradox of minerals such as lithium that are essential for decarbonization is that in order for high-income countries to transition to more sustainable economies, low income countries must bear the brunt of the impacts made from those decisions.

The communities that suffer from this relationship are not factored into the equation of progress because they exist outside of our context for what progress is. The root materials of first world industries are often found in the developing world.

Where are your roots?

Are they here?