“An old 16th-century Spanish colonial legend from South America, “The White King and the Silver Mountain”, promised that by traveling up the course of a great river located in the south of the continent one would reach the domain of a monarch who reigned from a mountain made entirely of silver.
This story would mark the beginning of a race to exhaust the continent’s resources for the benefit of foreign interests. Yesterday, the river was none other than the Río de la Plata, today Argentina, and the legendary mountain, the mount Potosí, today Bolivia: a triangular mound that rises to an altitude of more than 4,500 meters and is known for being one of the most important silver deposits in history, emptied during the Spanish occupation of the region.
Today, 500 years later, that same race for resource exploitation is perpetuated in another triangular form: the Lithium Triangle, bounded by Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, an area that concentrates more than 65% of the world’s reserves of lithium, a metal crucial for the manufacture of rechargeable batteries, commonly known as “new oil” and also “white gold.”
With a documentary approach imbued with a strong dreamlike component, through photography, sculpture, and archival material, I propose a parallel between these two triangular shapes and question the continuity of extractive machinery and its human, economic, and environmental consequences, exploring how this narrative continues to shape memory and territory.
“They took the silver and gold, they left us colored mirrors” (popular saying in South America)”

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