Artist Interview: Conversation with Amalia Lindo

Amalia Lindo is a multidisciplinary artist based inNaarm/Melbourne. Born in Harare in Zimbabwe and of Hispanic American origin, she works across video, sculpture, installation and drawing. Her practice investigates the environmental impacts of technological development, particularly the extraction of lithium and copper, that sustain batteries and data infrastructures. Developed through research in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a region central to global lithium production, Lindo’s work interrogates the ecological pressures embedded within global technological systems. Her presentation includes photographs, wall sculptures, and a video work that draws on complex imaging technologies and gaming aesthetics.

Lindo’s work positions photography as a set of technologies through which landscapes are measured, visualised and abstracted, and reveals the disconnect between digital consumption in the Global North and extraction in the Global South.

This interview between Amalia Lindo and Eleni James, MAMA Visitor Experience Assistant, occurred in July 2026.

These works engage old and new technologies to express the cosmological source of lithium and its extraction and commodification. Can you speak to using different mediums to capture a material relationship that exists within deep-time, at a crucial point in history?

Each work uses an image-based technology to trace the story of mineral extraction, from the origins of elements like lithium and copper in deep space to their extraction here on Earth. These elements are crucial in the production of batteries powering everyday technology.

Supernova 1987A (1.6 quintillion kilometres) was photographed in the Atacama Desert through a Newtonian telescope, pointing to the deep-space origins of elements such as lithium. As one of the most closely studied stellar explosions on record, it’s a key reference for scientists modelling how supernovae generate elements. El Tatio (−22.3349, −68.0130) was shot in the Atacama on 35mm film, capturing the geothermal activity of a landscape still shaped by that same movement of matter and heat through the earth.

Terraform (Olympic Dam: −30.4381, 136.8790) and Terraform (Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile: −23.5000, −68.2500) extend this act of image-making into another register, documenting a copper mine in Australia and a lithium producer in Chile. Each work draws on Digital Elevation Models, publicly available datasets that translate the surface of mine sites into precise topographical images. That imaging data is then used to generate the sculptural form, milled by CNC machine and set within a 3D-printed frame.

The film La Oscuridad draws these threads together, layering footage of landscapes across South America with lithium operations in the Atacama, with a Lickanantay creation story shared by Carlos Vega, a herder and healer. In the story, darkness is understood as the source of life rather than something to fear, bringing an ancient understanding of the land into contact with the extraction happening today.

The work is rooted in its specific geography but speaks to a global chain of extraction. Can you talk about the fieldwork experience in your practice?

My interest in global extraction began through my work as a research assistant for a human rights organisation investigating child exploitation in artisanal cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That research made visible the human and environmental cost behind the batteries powering our everyday technology. It was, however, desk-based work, conducted at a distance from these sites of extraction.

Fieldwork was how I closed that distance. South America was of particular interest, both as a region where extraction was reshaping remote communities, and because of my own Latin American heritage. I traveled to the Atacama Desert in 2024 for a residency focused on ecology and site-responsive research. That became the entry point to ten months living in San Pedro de Atacama, building relationships with people working in and around these landscapes.

Being in such proximity to major extraction sites gave the research a specificity and urgency that data alone could not. Conversations with the local community shaped how I came to see water, wind, minerals, plants, animals and humans as interdependent, a system which mining has disrupted firsthand.

Your materials encompass a range of references to popular technologies and aesthetics. Can you tell us about the imaginative connections that occur in the work?

Games are often built around collecting resources and managing territory, dividing the map into tiles and treating land as something to be surveyed, claimed, and extracted from, the same operations that structure an actual mine site. My film borrows this language directly, edited with a "mini-map" structure and a cursor that makes selections, but always within the limits the film sets. That constraint felt like a useful way to think about our current relationship to technology, where our choices are similarly shaped by the platforms and companies that build them.

The Terraform sculptures extend this thinking. Their translucent frames reveal their hardware components referencing early gaming consoles and 1990s computers that worked the same way, before contemporary devices sealed their inner workings from view. Together, these references speak to how gaming aestheticises extraction, presenting it as intuitive, rewarding, and progressive, revealing how our own choices are bound by the platforms and companies that shape them.

Amalia Lindo is a finalist of the 2026 National Photography Prize, presented by the MAMA Art Foundation.

On until 22 November 2026

Photography by Jeremy Weihrauch