The Spanish and Portuguese Department and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies present
Screening Dispossession as Orphanization: Decolonizing Mining through Collaborative Filmmaking in the Andes
Friday April 11, 2025
4:00-6:00 PM
HH 303
A talk by Barbara Galindo.
Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Media and Cultural Studies.
University of California, Riverside
Abstract:
The Andean salt flats in Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia are becoming critical sites for mining in the global race toward energy transition. This region has attracted the attention of transnational corporations vying for lithium, a mineral needed for electric storage batteries and promoted as essential for hydrocarbon-free future. However, companies often target Indigenous peoples' lands to extract lithium through methods that can lead to water depletion and pollution, exposing mining as a settler colonial genocidal technology of dispossession. In this talk, I will discuss how the Kolla and Atacama Indigenous peoples of northern Argentina use colllaborative film and video to resist lithium extraction. By focusing on the unique aspects of lithium extraction in the salt flats, I place the Kolla and Atacama's cultural activism within the broader context of other marginilized communities facing similar challenges in the expanding lithium rush across South America. I argue that Indigenous cosmopolitics plays a crucial role in audiovisual narratives aimed at decolonizing modern Western mining practices and representations, while also defending Indigenous sovereignty in Latin America/Abya Yala.