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With Salt and Rocks in Our Veins, part of The Entanglement of Desert Water project, was presented during Museum Night in The Hague. The work was featured within the programme of Stroom Den Haag, the city’s expertise centre for art, society, and the public domain. Stroom supports artistic research and interdisciplinary practice, and connects art with the city through residencies, thematic programmes, and professional development initiatives.
About the artwork
The piece examines water rights and the ongoing tension between ecological needs and human demands. It focuses on the poorly understood groundwater systems of the Atacama Desert, the oldest and driest desert on Earth, an area under increasing pressure due to lithium extraction for the green energy transition.
The artistic output is a gamified digital twin of remote saline lagoons, linked to a webcrawler that scans the internet for terms related to lithium and the energy transition. As hits increase, the virtual world degrades, mirroring groundwater loss and imagining a landscape where salt and rocks shift in response to environmental decline.
The work opens a dialogue bridging policy, science, water management, biodiversity, economics, and the microbial and hydrological realities of the Atacama.
About the SciArt collaboration
The collaboration began at the 2022 NaturArchy Summer School at the JRC, bringing together artist Penelope Cain, whose practice sits between scientific knowledge and hidden narratives, and JRC researchers Alan Belward (Food Security Unit) and Graziano Ceddia (social–environmental sciences).
Their joint research shaped a piece that brings art, science, and policy into conversation on water, extraction, and sustainability. Worldbuilding and programming are by Nathan Marcus.
Details
- Publication date