THE ENTANGLEMENT OF DESERT WATER

Water; biodiversity; extraction; economics and policy making.

This proposal proposes a dialogue and a storytelling that bridges these sites of knowledge and production; JRC policy and science expertise, water management, biodiversity and economics and the microbes and water in the desert of Atacama.

This is a unique opportunity to bridge the centre and the periphery via interdisciplinary collaboration with researchers at JRC, to consider question such as: 

• Definitions of water. Consideration of contested definitions of water, brine, subsoil, subterranean etc. How can they be measured and tracked across these unique lands? 
• Research undertaken within JRC around water, water management, microbial biodiversity within soil bacteria. 
• The relationship between water and ecosystem survival, and maintenance of biodiversity policies in the face of increasingly contested water access. How to consider and visualise the rights for nature. 
• The policies, economics and support structures for lithium battery power (and its mining) within Europe, for the goal of carbon neutrality to address anthropogenic global warming. 
• Direct connection to knowledge bases in Antofagasta. 

The project comprises of a residency period/s at the JRC, to spend time with researchers and policy developers in the territories described. To collect video, sound, photography data. It also includes an off-site period spent in the soil microbial knowledge hub at the University of Antofagasta and study trip to a water research site in the Atacama Desert. This off-site field research serves to connect two centres of knowledge, to collapse the distance between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’, and to artistically connect, through video, sound, interview, text, these two sites of knowledge and understanding of water, ecosystem management and how to approach a contract with nature. 

This project places art and science together in the central role; opening lines of communication and engagement with the public of the Antofagasta region and of the Ispra region; to communicate a sense of wonder in these unique soil microbial communities living in one of the harshest environments in the world; and of the policy need to consider water, and the complexities of environmental requirements. It further highlights the role of scientific research across fields of knowledge in better understanding these needs.

PREDICTED ART-SCI OUTCOME 

A critically urgent storytelling across spheres of knowledge and media, communicating the entanglement of water, biodiversity and economics through the protagonist of the extremophile bacteria. 

I will gather data in video, photography and sound modalities across all sites and the final outcome will centre around a micro-macro journey of water through the land, from a water and soil bacterial eye-view. The outcome will be an engaging and aesthetically centred artistic storytelling with the potential to carry the viewer along the journey and covey, without words, the role of science across a field of areas of expertise, in better understanding the need for nature in these sites. 

The final work has the potential to be a video and sound based work, potentially immersive/ projection+ screen. Additionally sculptural/ sensorial elements providing a material storytelling; such as lithium alloy, salt, slag (from lithium alloy production), to be developed in co-creation with SACO, in Chile.

In the salars of Atacama, a rare form of saline wetlands, live a unique, and until recently, poorly understood biodiversity of microbes. Able to survive in saline, high solar radiation and temperature extremes they have evolved a unique set of microbial skills- from novel pigments limiting UV damage, to restricted needs for free water, to acids strong enough to etch a micro-habitat in the hard gypsum-rich rocks around which they live, in addition to an active role in recycling greenhouse gases (CO2, NO2), and sulphur gases. 

The salars are the only natural form of (almost) free water in this exquisitely dry environment. Ironically, the only water visible on the Global Surface Water Explorer tool for this lithium rich area of Atacama is seen in Lithium mine ponds, where it has been pumped from the water table under the salars, to be utilised in the extraction and purification process for lithium salt from the ancient rocky soil. 

These remote salars contain a series of conflicts that are increasingly common globally- limited water resources, jobs and hard currency from mining, unique fragile ecologies, and a tension between humans, environment and economics. 

The tension of water and ecosystem rights in Atacama is particularly cruel because of the role lithium plays in bridging to a carbon-neutral, energy sustainable future. Policies around energy sustainability, carbon neutrality (and climate responsibility) written in offices in the Global North, and power centres such as Brussels, impact directly on land management and justice for nature- and the chances for a unique bacterial ecosystem survival in peripheries in the Global South, such as Atacama. 

I have recently been invited to undertake an artist in residency research period with arts organisation, SACO, Antofagasta1, and in response I have developed a proposal to research the contested water history and the unique landscape of the salars, including a micro- residency in the soil bacteria research laboratories of the University of Antofagasta. The artist residency invitation presented itself as a unique opportunity to develop a connection between the JRC’s knowledge centre, the SciArt program and this remote site.

The JRC’s Global Surface Water Research Explorer app is the entry point for this project, and central to this is the JRC knowledge base for detecting water, methodologies for remote visualisation of water, models for predicting water balances. 

Dr Alan Belward has confirmed his involvement with this project. The knowledge held within the remote visualisation team, and the visualisation of the history of water movement at Atacama and around the planet will be the starting point for this interdisciplinary project. 

Dr Bernd Gawlik (Water Quality) has confirmed his involvement with this project. He has expressed interest in the potential to connect this towards the UNEP in Nairobi and potentially creating an additional site for the social engagement workstream in this area. 

The JRC’s soil biodiversity database and the data visualisation modalities for soil biomes will be explored. (Potential contacts include Dr Arwyn Jones; Dr Sandra Coecke has been assisting in accessing this knowledge hub). 

Dr Graziano Ceddia, Sustainability Governance Impact Area, with a research background in Land use cover change in South America and Indigenous Peoples land rights has confirmed his involvement with this project. He is uniquely positioned to provide knowledge and pose questions around the intersection between land use, ecological policy making and economics, and has confirmed his involvement with this project. 

Additionally; the off-site knowledge centre of the University in Antofagasta. The UoA have confirmed the artist-in residency.

 There is a further possibility to connect with the traditional landowners and local people of the Atacama region- with their understanding and vernacular knowledge-base around water and life in the desert, via SACOs community knowledge base. Serving to ground this investigation within a local understanding and needs.

1. Spending time at JRC with Dr Alan Belward’s team / Dr Bernd Gawlik’s team/ other researchers; Land Use Change Management Unit and One Water project to better understand: 

• The finite global resource of water. 
• The movement of water bodies, both in geographical space and time. 
• Methodologies for mapping and visualising of water use by humans for agriculture and industry. - Imaging modalities: LANDSAT for freewater. Estimations of Groundwater: 
• Where does non-oceanic saline/ brine water fit? 
• This line for research may have the future opportunity to expand to consider other water contested, mineral extracted areas (eg via Dr Gawlik’s involvement with UNEP).
• Artistic data gathering through interviews, video, sound.
• Considering modes of detecting and understanding the unique extremophile microbial ecosystem: via literature review and the JRC soil biodiversity database and knowledge hub. 

2. Economics and policy engagement considerations with Graziano Ceddia, economist, JRC. How do central economic polices consider biodiversity and peripheries? What is the policy and economic lens to this art-sci research? How to consider the economic history of mineral extractions in environmentally sensitive areas, in Chile, Europe and globally. 

3. Off-site research and connection of knowledge sites: To spend time off-site research at the University of Antofagasta (UoA). Hosted by regional arts centre, SACO, in the window Q2/Q3. Engagement with microbial and water management researchers at University of Antofagasta to understand current research in lab and the field. SACO is undertaking all the local (Chilean) hosting, with a view to exhibiting some of the artistic outcome in the SACO biennale of art, Nov 2023. 

This phase offers huge potential to connect the two knowledge centres: JRC and the UoA, at a multidisciplinary science level and a cultural/ artistic level.