What the Salt Crystals Knew: Desert, Extraction, and Poetic Knowledge

In a time when the climate crisis accelerates into full gear, the so-called “green transition” reveals itself as another failed project of modernity. Far from dismantling extractivism, it expands its frontiers into new territories under the promise of sustainability. The lithium rush in the South American salt flats—lands portrayed as barren, desolate, and “empty”—exemplifies this paradox. What the Salt Crystals Knew, a video-animation filmed in the Mascasín salt flats of San Juan, Argentina, explores this terrain both materially and symbolically. The work questions the historical construction of “the desert” as a category of emptiness and barbarism, a colonial trope that justified territorial conquest and continues to authorize extractive projects under ecological pretexts. This paper situates What the Salt Crystals Knew within the intertwined histories of environmental transformation, colonial expansion, and artistic inquiry. Through poetic knowledge, it proposes an alternative epistemology to the scientific and technocratic rationalities that perceive the world as inert matter. Reframing the desert not as absence but as a living field of relations, What the Salt Crystals Knew invites a renewed encounter with environments systematically misrepresented as void. The desert, once defined by lack, emerges instead as a site of planetary knowledge—where salt crystals remember what progress has tried to forget.