SEBASTIAN BRIONES
Lejania

When I visited the Chilean mine Teniente, a few hours north of Santiago, high on a nearby mountain were a set of white crosses. A man told me that the children of a nearby mining town were buried there, because their bodies could not be brought home. I watched them for a long time. On a small empty hill above the clouds.

I continued north. To where lithium and copper excavation starts in earnest. To a desert without water or clouds. El Teniente is 2,300 feet above sea level. The Atacama is 13,000 feet. It is without water. It is without ozone.

It is the closest I have been to the sky.

During the project I followed copper and lithium deposits from their origin in mines located in the Atacama; operated by both CODELCO and independents to their final destination in harbors near Iquique where they would be shipped to the US and Europe. Along the way I discovered small abandoned or dying mining communities, former Pinochet concentration camps and the forgotten cost of globalization.

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