WHITE GOLD: LITHIUM

Research for the creation of a performance by Flavio Barollo | Human (se)cure, about the [Lithium] Experiment No. 1 within the Artivist Residency ÉClima, Megafone Ativismo, LabExperimental, Parede Viva and Condô Cultural. Voice by Aílton Krenak Images by Anahi Asa and Edu Marin #éclima

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqPpWMRPX6M

Synopsis

In White Gold, Lithium, a solo performer, dressed in a suit and tie, welcomes the audience while progressively whitening his face with rice powder, both as a ritual preparation and as a social mask. He announces an “energy transition experiment”, proposing the shift from “black gold”, oil and coal, to “white gold”, lithium, framed as the promise of clean energy. In front of the audience, he handles a specimen of the Atlantic Forest and carries out a sequence of direct, irreversible actions, cutting the leaves with large shears, burning the plant with a blowtorch, and smashing the pot with a demolition hammer, as if digging down to the mineral itself.

From the rubble, he “finds” a lithium stone and performs an alchemy with fire, attempting to dissolve lithium, turning matter into solution, into a liquid promise. Wearing a respirator mask and protective goggles, he uses a brush and white pigment to paint his face, head, neck, collar, and tie, and then paints the lithium battery as well, as if whiteness could certify a green victory. At the peak, he raises the objects like a conquest, connects the battery to a solar panel, and then grabs a smartphone, scrolling through social media and talking nonsense, exposing the short-circuit between the myth of a “clean” transition and the real consumption of minerals and territories that sustains digital life. The action ends by opening the irony to the audience, who are invited to film and go live, turning critique into shared spectacle, and revealing everyday complicity with the very device the work is dismantling.

Argument

The performance builds a miniature dramaturgy of extraction, condensed into body and scene. Whitening the face with rice powder is not just a visual trick, it establishes a political field in which “white” appears as cleanliness, neutrality, progress, and at the same time as a mask, a way of sanitizing what is born from material violence. When the performer announces an “energy transition experiment”, the format is that of a typical presentation, explanation, demonstration, yet the demonstration immediately becomes a sequence of assaults on living matter.

The Atlantic Forest specimen becomes compressed territory, a portable landscape that can be cut, burned, and shattered to “reach” lithium. Extractivist logic appears without disguise, first the brutal cutting, then the fire, then the demolition hammer, as if drilling, crushing, and breaking were the operational language of the future. Finding the lithium stone and “dissolving” it with fire exposes a contemporary alchemical fantasy, turning destruction into solution, territory into energy, cost into narrative.

When whiteness returns as paint and spreads across the body, the suit, the tie, and the battery, the work locks image and critique together. It becomes whitening as coating, as protection, as an attempt to aestheticize transition and sell purity precisely when the body has already moved through fire, dust, and ruin. The respirator and goggles are not only safety gear, they are the iconography of toxic labor that “green” discourse prefers to hide. Finally, the smartphone use, right after the solar panel and battery connection, shifts the promise of autonomy into daily addiction, distraction, empty speech, making the whole chain visible, from mineral to feed, from territory to habit, from extractivism to entertainment.

By inviting the audience to film and livestream, the piece expands the critique into the economy of attention, recording, and participation. It does not point only at “others”, corporations, governments, mining companies, it places the audience and the performer inside the same circuit, the circuit of the device, the image, acceleration, and consumption that needs to believe in a clean transition in order to keep operating. Humor and irony do not soften the scene, they expose the mechanism, turning denunciation into a mirror, and making the audience feel the discomfort of producing, in real time, the same machine being questioned.