Lithium

Davey Whitcraft

Related terms: afterlife, Anthropocene, colonisation, enclosure, exhaustion, extractivism, haunting, infrastructure, memory, mining,

What echoes in the Earth when its salts are taken – from the past, as well as from futures it will never reach? What fractures in the act, and what temporalities are displaced when extraction becomes the grammar of transition?

Lithium is a convergence of fractured timescapes, affective residues, and entangled histories – a critical locus where extractive modernity and planetary futurity collide. Forged by extractive desire and planetary urgency, it carries spectral afterlives that resist closure. To follow its trace is to reckon with deep memory, with the violence of transition, and with the impossibility of extraction unmarked by consequence.

Lithium extraction refers to the industrial processes used to obtain lithium, a light, reactive metal essential to batteries, energy storage, and the so-called “green energy transition.” Most lithium is extracted through brine evaporation in high-altitude salt flats (e.g., Chile, Bolivia, Argentina) or through hard rock mining (e.g., Australia, Portugal). These processes draw heavily on water, energy, and labour – and are often located in ecologically sensitive, Indigenous-held, or historically colonised territories.

Framed as the enabler of planetary salvation, lithium conceals the impossibility of a truly clean transition – one that reproduces colonial geographies and extractive logics beneath a green veneer. Beyond the economics of supply chains and the geopolitics of green capitalism, lithium extraction is a symptom of a deeper, slower logic: the continuation of extractive modernity under the guise of sustainability discourse.

Lithium extraction is more than a technical procedure: it is a cultural condition. It is the ghosting of landscapes in the name of technological progress, accelerated mobility, enhanced communication and media consumption, and psychiatric treatment. All these processes require pure lithium, a form that does not exist naturally but must be mined and chemically refined. It is the contradiction of an energy transition that leaves sacrificed zones in its wake.

Extraction becomes a practice of rupture – a severance of mineral from mountain, river from valley, place from particle. It is a modality of appropriation that takes without reciprocity, drills without listening, converting landscapes into inventories awaiting exhaustion. While all life extracts – plants draw nutrients, oceans absorb carbon – extractivism names a specific regime of asymmetrical power and accumulation. There is no outside to extraction, but there are differences in relation and consequence. Marking those differences reveals the violence of certain extractions as they fold into late capitalist time.

Under an extractivist regime, minerals become commodities, forests are reduced to ledger lines, and ecological relations collapse into transactions. Extraction recasts landscapes as neutral ground, stripping away cosmologies, stories, and the slow sedimentations of life. It is a framework of forgetting, legitimising environmental and cultural erasure in the name of technological progress.

When a mineral becomes currency, it also crosses ontological thresholds. In dominant Western frameworks, such a shift flattens the mineral into an economic object, stripping away the relations, meanings, and temporalities embedded in its being. But as Descola (2013) argues, other cosmologies do not separate nature from culture in this way. Minerals are not necessarily inert matter but can instead be approached as participants in networks of reciprocity and significance. To ask what a mineral forgets, then, is to mark the violence of reduction – to signal what is lost when relational beings are rendered as abstract value.

Ontologically, lithium traverses thresholds: from being to commodity, relation to resource, presence to data point. In some cosmologies, it is not an inert object but entangled – an agent in systems of reciprocity and meaning. Its commodification, then, is not neutral: it is a reclassification that flattens ecological and cosmological relations into transactional form. Lithium demands a reckoning with the costs of green energy transition metaphysics. Historically, lithium extends the deep continuity of extractive frontierism, echoing colonial and capitalist logics that reconfigure land, labour, and energy across centuries.

In temporal terms, lithium can be approached through what Barbara Adam calls the timescapes of modernity: overlapping temporal fields shaped by uneven rhythms, deferred effects, and long-duration harm (Adam 1998). Environmental degradation, she suggests, often eludes recognition because it unfolds outside the dominant regime of fast, measurable, present-oriented time. Following Adam’s critique of modernity’s time regime, lithium’s accelerated incorporation into green supply chains belies the slow violence (Nixon 2011) and long memory of its extraction sites. Lithium emerges as a temporal hinge – where deep geologic durations meet the speed of renewable demand, and where Indigenous, colonial, and capitalist timescapes collide. Claire Colebrook extends this critique by urging us to think of memory at a planetary scale – beyond the human, beyond the now (Colebrook 2017). What we encounter in lithium is a thick presence: a multi-temporal zone in which the residue of past extractions, the urgency of transition discourse, and the haunting of yet-to-come consequences converge.

Tracing lithium’s temporal entanglements could be a step to recovering what has been displaced, and toward imagining what futures might resist extraction’s inherited logics. Artistic practice, then, becomes a way to re-temporalise extraction – a method of making felt what Adam names “invisible hazards” and what Colebrook describes as the memory of the planet itself. To think with lithium is to confront a mineral archive – one that records the layered temporal, ethical, and planetary consequences of the transition we are told will save us. As Chakrabarty (2009; 2021) argues, human histories are now deeply interwoven with the biogeological history of the planet – a layering that conventional histories of capital fail to address. Lithium, in this sense, makes visible the superimposition of deep time and crisis time, where colonial afterlives and geologic futures are sedimented together.

Artistic research opens space not only for critique but for attunement – to geologic time, to nonhuman testimony, to the possibility that not all has been forgotten. Here, witnessing becomes a mode of attention that echoes Derrida’s call to listen to the voices of those not fully present, to engage what remains unresolved and resistant to closure (Derrida 1994). From an artist’s standpoint, lithium extraction registers in the visible scars of open-pit mines revealed by satellite imagery, but also in atmospheres – in the ghost of water that no longer flows, in the silences of disrupted places. The mineral marks remembrance, even as extraction insists we forget.

In returning to the mineral’s memory, we begin to listen differently. As Latour (2017) suggests in Facing Gaia, to listen differently is to treat the Earth not as a passive substrate, but as a responsive assemblage – capable of registering, remembering, and resisting extraction. Art functions as both a register of loss and a mode of interruption, making space for alternate forms of relation. In confronting lithium’s layered violence, artistic practice affirms the possibility of perceiving otherwise – of staying with what resists assimilation into data, value, or solution.

References

Adam, Barbara. 1998. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. London: Routledge.

Colebrook, Claire. 2017. “The Time of Planetary Memory.” Textual Practice 31 (5): 1017-1024.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry  35 (2): 197-222.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Latour, Bruno.  2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Whitcraft, Davey. To Those Who Create the Future. Single-channel HD video, 09:18 min. 2024.