Documenting Argentine Indigenous Resistance to Lithium Extraction on Wikimedia Commons

Lithium currently holds a strategic position in the global economy. Argentina, together with Bolivia and Chile, forms part of the so called Lithium Triangle, one of the regions with the largest reserves in the world. However, lithium extraction from salt flats involves the use of large volumes of water and the alteration of particularly fragile hydrological balances. In high altitude arid ecosystems, where water is scarce and essential for plant, animal, and human life, these interventions generate impacts, especially in territories inhabited by Indigenous communities since ancestral times.

In the Andean highlands, at 3,450 meters above sea level, the Salinas Grandes, located between the provinces of Jujuy and Salta, may appear to outside visitors as a silent, empty, and infinite landscape. This idea of an uninhabited territory has historically appeared in processes of extractive expansion and territorial transformation driven from urban or economic centers. It is part of a broader tradition in Argentina and Latin America, where Indigenous territories have been described as empty or available for development from external perspectives. However, the Salinas Grandes are a territory of community life. Indigenous communities live and move there, maintaining their own forms of organization, productive practices, ways of caring for water, and cultural relationships with the environment that predate current extractive models.

In this setting, where the horizon merges salt and sky, community expressions become part of the landscape. They appear in signs placed directly on the salt flat, visible to workers, visitors, and tourists, although their circulation in free digital media has been limited. In this context, Wikimedia offers the possibility for documentation to emerge from people who live in and move through these spaces, helping to record realities that have little presence in open digital repositories. In this line, Luisfff2812, a member of the Indigenous community of Purmamarca and promoter of Wikimedistas de Jujuy, released photographs of signs opposing extractivism and defending water, created by Indigenous communities in the province. Through these images, the signs can be accessed and reused worldwide via Wikimedia Commons. They function as territorial markers indicating that the space is inhabited and given meaning by local communities. As open visual knowledge, they can illustrate Wikipedia articles, educational materials, research, or journalistic content, expanding the visual representation of these contexts in digital environments. In this way, Wikimedia Commons becomes a space for intercultural documentation and an archive of contemporary social and socioenvironmental processes in northern Argentina.

The released photographs do not replace local processes, but they do influence the field of visibility. They contribute to ensuring that, when lithium in Argentina is addressed, the expressions of Indigenous communities are also considered. This is relevant in a context where a national narrative centered on the urban and the modern has predominated, often minimizing the continuity of Indigenous communities throughout the country. From an open knowledge perspective, these images expand the set of available records, since invisibilization can also occur through the absence of documentation.

Indigenous communities sustain political and territorial demands that do not always appear in dominant imaginaries. Indigenous peoples are frequently represented in historical or cultural terms, but have less presence as contemporary actors in debates about development, energy, and territory. The existence of open images of these expressions allows narratives about lithium extraction to incorporate their social dimension.

All the photographs show organized communities expressing their positions, allow analyses to be illustrated with situated images, and facilitate consideration of the energy transition alongside its social dimensions. They also make visible that discussions surrounding extraction are not limited to technical or development issues, but involve territorial, cultural, and collective dimensions. In these contexts, water is not understood solely as a resource, but as a central element for life and for relationships with the environment, and territory is conceived as a space of memory, identity, and community existence. The signs raised in the Salinas Grandes emerge from this worldview. They are part of a broader organizational process in which communities demand consultation, defend water sources, and express critiques of certain development models.

The energy transition is not only technological, but also social and territorial. A wooden sign on the salt flat may deteriorate or disappear, but a photograph on Commons, free and reusable, extends its permanence and reach.