Dear Lithium

Dear Lithium is a multi-output research project, exploring the effects of the digital/non-digital divide on experience of place, intimacy, and togetherness. Produced during the COVID-19 lockdowns and their aftermath, the research took the discovery of a pilot UK lithium extraction test as its central narrative drive, weaving the qualities of the material of lithium into a complex and combative text which fights with, and within, the digital. Lithium is both a prescribed mood stabiliser and an increasingly important material for battery power in digital devices and engines. The work contends with the implications of extractive practices on landscapes, the effects of the digital on our experiences of the world, and how these influence our relationship to the elsewhere.

The publication of the research takes two forms. The first is a single-edition printed publication made up of six hand-bound sections of text in poem, prose, and letter form; loose analogue photographs; and a wrap title jacket. This object was placed in a public book exchange near the site of the UK’s first pilot lithium extraction plant, United Downs, Cornwall, and remains the only edition in circulation.

The second is a fragmentary version of the text and images, on the website dear-lithium.exposed. It is a journey through digital fragments: hyperlinks, dead ends, disembodied sounds, and immersive imagery disorientate and dictate a way through the narrative.

Throughout the work, analogue images are used as tools for distancing and disorientation. Made while on location in the areas surrounding the site of the lithium extraction, which had been located through a mixture of online research and conjecture, the images exacerbate sensations of distance and unreachability through the use of a macro lens and a high grain 35mm film. 

The text itself follows the character A., who struggles with her narrative position and instability, switching from cryptic correspondence to diary-like entries that describe attempts at escaping her room and city from where she writes. The receiver of the letters written by A. remains a shadow, at the centre of her desires and yet a voiceless other out of reach. Tempted close to the confessional, yet frustratingly evasive, the text is a confused telling of a journey from one place to another, on the search for the heart of the elsewhere. What is discovered is a void, a nothing, much like the gaps in rocks that are sought out by drones-eye when searching for signs of lithium rich rock. The journey ends with the realisation that what A. was looking for - the person, the place, the revelation - was too much to ask for, was almost a fiction from the start.