Lithium

Laguna Miscanti is a brackish water lake located at 4,200 meters of altitude in the antiplano of the Antofagasto Region, in northern Chile. Miñiques volcano, on the left, and the Cerro Miscanti, on the right, can be found just behind it. The western shoreline of the lake is separated by less than one kilometre from the drainage divide between the lake and the Salar de Atacama basins. The lake is part of one of the seven sectors of Los Flamencos Natural Reserve.

From here the water collected from the falling raindrops and the melting of the ice peaks gets filtered down the mountain through rivers flowing under the ground. Above the ground the temperatures are high and the humidity is practically absent. This water, full of salt and volcanic minerals, will only resurface from holes found more than one kilometer below our feet, onto other salt lakes found at the Salar de Atacama.

There, under one of the most arid climates in the planet, the water simply evaporates. To my surprise, it does not only leave behind traces of the obvious product, rock salt. The Salar de Atacama is also, together with the neighbouring Salar de Uyuni, the world's major producer of Lithium.

Lithium is the organic representation of emotional stability. I only found out about the properties of Lithium when I was a kid because back then my mother and I shared a house for a while with my aunt, who suffered from schizophrenia. I was told her ocasional passages of delirium were caused by a lack of lithium in her organism. And here I was, in front of the mother of all the lithium tablets consumed and quite often avoided by many.

According to modern cosmological theory, lithium—as both of its stable isotopes lithium-6 and lithium-7—was among the 3 elements synthesize in the Big Bang and is believed to have been formed when the universe was between 100 and 300 seconds old. Lithium seems to me as intrinsic to our nature as water. One could ask how is it possible that the key to our physical emotional stability is so closely related to the physics of our world? However my question remains one less mystical and much more down to earth, what do we do when we stand in front of it?

Blurred Boundaries 2

Forming

These pictures were taken on the same trip yet in two very different places, the altitude of the B-357 road, crossing the andes on its way to the Atacama dessert in Chile, and the altitude of a plane overlooking the great Chaco on its way to Iguazu. Both were photographed while being in movement yet at truly different speeds in relation to the land they portray (one on a coach, the other on a plane). However they both ask the same question: how do we form?

The first still made me think of Emilia. She is a good friend of my mother who made me understand grammar in a completely different way. As someone who worked with adults to help them become literate she understood language like no other. She was articulate enough to make me see how grammar wasn't just a set of rules but responded to a need to associate meanings and a need to communicate those to others. So, in my little head while at school, if I wanted to understand a writing's meaning I needed to understand its grammar, as form was intrinsic to meaning.

It was Emilia too, not the teacher but the warm and rebel woman, who made me see that freedom came from unexpected associations, from using those same tools to form new meanings. And so my guess is that we form and form in the lookout to liberate ourselves from those associations that were set at a time when we were not able to understand their formation.

To Emilia.