9th May 2026 • 0

The Water Sanctuary

How do we balance the historical constant of mankind’s need to pursue innovative development, push technological boundary’s and seek cultural betterment without ignoring and destroying our environment, and conveniently “green washing” any linked exploition involving rare earth extraction at the same time?

Atoll journal (co-written with ChatGPT-5.4 and first uploaded 09th May 2026) explores the huge environmental irony and paradox of the mass lithium extraction via deep brine pumping being highlighted by Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno in his monumental land art installation El Santuario del Agua (The Water Sanctuary) due for completion in 2026 on the Salinas Grandes salt flats, part of South America’s infamous Lithium Triangle.

The Water Sanctuary: Land Art, Lithium and the True Global Cost of the Green Transition

At over 3,000 metres above sea level, the vast expanse and distinctive geommetry of the Salinas Grandes salt flats, spanning the Jujuy and Salta provinces of northern Argentina, aerially appear almost as extraterrestrial as the distant desert geoglyphs that trace the famous Nazca Lines in Peru. This expansive 82-square-mile sea of salt crust is one of the most magnificent natural wonders of South America. Indigenous populations here, particularly the Kolla and Atacama peoples, have historically used the high plains for sustainable salt harvesting, livestock grazing, and cross-Andean barter.

But hidden beneath the surface layers of its dazzling white salt, also lies one of the world’s largest reserves of lithium — a mineral becoming increasingly essential to modern life. Named after the ancient Greek name lythos for ‘stone’, it is the least dense metal and the least dense solid element. Lithium is now in increasing demand to power the burgeoning smartphones, laptops, electric vehicles and the battery technologies upon which governments and corporations (and so by default, us all) are staking the future of our sustainable energy revolution. Yet the extraction of this supposedly “green” resource has become deeply controversial, particularly among Indigenous communities who depend upon the fragile water systems in the delicate ecosystems of the high Andean plateau.

It is within this contested landscape that Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno has created El Santuario del Agua (The Water Sanctuary), a monumental environmental artwork developed in collaboration with eleven Indigenous communities of the region. The installation transforms the salt flats themselves into both medium and message, drawing attention to the hidden ecological cost of the renewable-energy economy. The project is said to be completing sometime in late 2026. It is strongly tied to the Aerocene Foundation and the Indigenous network Red Atacama. This and the fuel-free hot air balloon project Fly with Aerocene Pacha combines ancestral knowledge, community-managed eco tourism, and zero-emission art to protest against all “green” mining.

An extension of Saraceno’s Sal de Acá (Salt from Here) art work series, this land art consists of five immense adobe domes of differing size, constructed primarily from the salt itself. Their shapes are loosely inspired by apachetas — the traditional Andean stone cairns left as offerings to Pachamama, the earth deity and the Apus mountain deities, central to indigenous cosmology throughout the Andes. Here, visitors are to ascend stairways cut into the rear of each form, before reaching an elevated viewing platform that overlooks the endless white horizon. Then, when seasonal rain returns, the hemispheres and sky become mirrored as a whole as the salt crust floods – thus revealing what Saraceno has described as their “hidden half”, but now eerily levitated. Their given names of Inti, Killa, Ch’aska, Hawcha and Tiqsimuyu, derive from Andean cosmology and the Quechua language, with each representing a different celestial body (the Sun, Moon, Venus, Uranus and Earth) and so referencing spiritual concepts long embedded within local tradition. In Andean cosmology, nature is alive and adding a stone to an apacheta is a highly respected ritual. It acts as a physical token of gratitude, a request for strength, or a prayer to the Earth Spirits for the rest of any journey.

Linked indirectly to El Santuario del Agua and Sal de Acá is also the acclaimed 2021 documentary En el nombre del litho (In the Name of Lithium) directed by Martin Caminos and Cristian Cartier, which followed Clemente Flores, an Indigenous resident of El Moreno. That film also captured the local community’s fight to protect the Salinas Grandes flats from being turned into a lithium “sacrifice zone” by multinational mining companies. It is their recurring fear.

The mirror-reflection of Saraceno’s domes are vaguely reminiscent of seeing the luminous sphere of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake. In this, a huge multimedia installation was projected onto a single large sphere in the public green space of Memory Grove Park, set within one of Salt Lake City’s seven canyons. But in El Santuario del Agua, (on a salt flat created by volcanic action, 10 million years ago), there is no need for any artificially applied multi media. Here, the often blinding white light is created naturally due to the endless expanses of white, crystalline salt  reflecting the sun – whilst during the wet season a mirror effect also occurs as rain adds a thin layer of water over the hard salt crust, whilst a shimmering of light effect, creating mirages on the horizon, can occur at the golden hour at twilight. But the area is also famous for its absolute, echoing silence too, offering an almost sensory deprivation effect. Other than the whistling of occasional high-altitude winds or the crunch of footsteps over its thick salt crust, this silence is deafening: All things combined, it is a unique and otherworldly sensory environment.

That El Santuario del Agua will exist simultaneously as sculpture, pilgrimage site and environmental protest is a given. It is impossible to separate its aesthetic impact from the political reality and message beneath it. Lithium extraction in this “Lithium Triangle” — spanning Argentina, Bolivia and Chile — relies not on conventional extractive mining, but on the pumping-up of mineral-rich underground brines into enormous evaporation ponds. Over many months, solar evaporation then concentrates the lithium until it can be processed into lithium carbonate for global export. The process consumes vast quantities of water in one of the driest inhabited regions on Earth.

This exact same contradiction lies at the very heart of the book Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization by Ed Conway. In it, Conway argues that the creation of our modern civilisation rests upon our acquisition and exploiting of six essential raw materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. His examination of lithium extraction itself, exposed the troubling paradox: Technologies marketed as environmentally sustainable often depend upon industrial processes that are in themselves ecologically destructive. So it is, in these high-altitude salt flats of South America, that the extraction of lithium now threatens wetlands, wildlife habitats and ancient water systems relied upon by Indigenous peoples for many generations.

But in Argentina itself, a country that holds a fifth of global lithium reserves, largely in these high-altitude salt flats, its own chainsaw-wielding President Javier Milei currently presents the greatest threat. He views sustainability as secondary to growth, and like his MAGA ally and fellow conspiracist Trump, he has already dismissed climate change as the ultimate “socialist lie”. Since coming to power in 2023, his administration has also aggressively deregulated the mining sector to attract foreign investment, and specifically target lithium and copper extraction as a “manna from heaven” to solve Argentina’s fiscal crisis. Indeed, in April 2026, Milei’s “neo-extractivist” environmental policies passed a bill through Congress allowing mining in glacial and periglacial areas – previously protected as vital water reserves. Whilst this bill does not directly alter salt flat operations in locations like Salinas Grandes , the decentralisation of environmental oversight creates a regulatory environment highly favorable to expanding such lithium extraction.

Saraceno’s installation visualises and exposes precisely these same economic pressures, political hypocrisies and tension. Rather than producing a detached gallery artwork, he situates his practice directly within the affected landscape and alongside the communities most impacted by extraction. The work therefore belongs firmly within the broader traditions of land art and environmental art that emerged during the late twentieth century.

The origins of land art is, of course, often associated with the artist Robert Smithson and his seminal work Spiral Jetty (1970), constructed from rock and earth extending into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Smithson was fascinated by entropy — the gradual decay and transformation of landscapes shaped by industrial activity and geological time. His work frequently explored abandoned mines, quarries and scarred environments where nature slowly reclaimed human intervention. Like Smithson, Saraceno uses salt itself as both material and metaphor, allowing the environment to become an active participant in the artwork.

Environmental critique also underpinned the practice of Agnes Denes. Her famous installation Wheatfield – A Confrontation (1982) transformed a landfill site beside Wall Street into a functioning wheat field, confronting viewers with questions of consumption, inequality and ecological neglect. Saraceno similarly juxtaposes modern industry against ancient landscapes and traditional cultures, asking viewers to reconsider what is sacrificed in the pursuit of technological progress.

The monumental scale of El Santuario del Agua also recalls the ambitious interventions of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose temporary transformations of landscapes and architecture drew attention to humanity’s relationship with public space and political geography.

Meanwhile, the experiential dimension of Saraceno’s elevated viewing platforms evokes comparisons with Walter De Maria’s sublime The Lightning Field (1977), consisting of 400 stainless steel lightning rods set in the ground over a 1 mile x 1 kilometre grid array in the high desert in Western New Mexico. Here, visitors become physically immersed within natural forces and atmospheric conditions of this remote plateau.

There are echoes too of James Turrell and his ongoing Roden Crater project in Arizona. Turrell’s work manipulates perception, sky and celestial alignment to create meditative encounters between humanity and the cosmos. Saraceno similarly connects earthly materials with spiritual and astronomical symbolism rooted in Indigenous Andean cosmology.

Yet unlike many earlier environmental land artists, Saraceno’s practice is explicitly collaborative and politically engaged. Earlier monumental earthworks were often criticised for imposing artistic visions onto remote landscapes with little reference to local communities. El Santuario del Agua instead attempts to amplify Indigenous voices resisting industrial extraction and water depletion.

In this sense, the installation becomes more than sculpture. It functions as a warning monument for the Anthropocene — an era in which humanity’s technological ambitions increasingly reshape the planet itself. The shimmering beauty of the salt flats conceals a struggle over resources, ecology and survival. Saraceno’s work asks uncomfortable but necessary questions: can the transition to renewable energy truly be considered “green” if it destroys fragile ecosystems elsewhere? And who ultimately bears the environmental cost of modern convenience?

Like all the greatest works of land art that came before it, El Santuario del Agua aspires to transforms landscape into consciousness. It reminds us that even the desired green technologies of our immediate human future remain rooted in condoning (whether actively or passively) escalations of unsustainable, mining of Rare Earth Elements. That these are taken from a planet 4.5 billion years old, but where our so-called ‘civilised society’ has existed on it for the last 5,000 to 6,000 years only, is the greatest irony. But as Tomás Saraceno has showcased here, there are urgent lessons needed to be learnt quickly from the ancient, Indigenous ways – in terms of advocating for far more moral and spiritual shepherding and extracting of our planet’s key elements.

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda offered-up his own Andean reflection on this timeless sentiment in his 1957 poem “Ode to Salt”. In it, he celebrated the seemingly mundane, everyday mineral, whilst transforming it into an emblem of history, labour, and the endlessly infinite. His poem explored how simple salt connected our simple daily meals to the vastness of the ocean, the harsh realities of miners, and the boundless beauty of our Earth. His was a subtle message back then – but now an almost forgotten one, in the gathering momentum of what is beginning to look very much like the greatest and greediest ever global gold rush the World has seen yet.

“Dust of the sea, in you the tongue receives a kiss from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned dish your ocean essence;
the smallest, miniature wave from the saltcellar reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness; in it, we taste infinitude”.

Pablo Neruda, 1904-1973 

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