Fly with Pacha, Into the Aerocene, 2017—2023

Duration: 76 minutes, 25 seconds.

Languages: In Spanish and English with English subtitles

Directors: Maximiliano Laina and Tomás Saraceno

Script: Claudia Aboaf, Tomás Saraceno, Iosi Havilio.

In the Andean culture, Pacha is a superior energy that organizes and harmonizes all inhabitants in the Cosmos. A message, a film, a journey around the sun with Pachamama, a space-time towards eras of complementarities, Fly with Pacha, into the Aerocene portrays the long-standing relationship between many ever-growing communities across multiple continents, documenting the ongoing collaboration between Aerocene and the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, in Jujuy, Northern Argentina. 

Initiated in 2017, with additional archival fragments dating from 2006 onwards, this project is an ongoing dialogue with Kollas Indigenous Peoples, protecting their ancestral lands from lithium extraction, for eco-social justice in the name of the peoples of the Global South. 

In Jujuy in January 2020, the aerosolar sculpture Aerocene Pacha rose using only the air and the sun, completely free from fossil fuels, batteries, lithium, helium, and hydrogen, becoming the most sustainable flight in human history. This journey set 32 world records, recognised by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), with Aerocene pilot Leticia Noemi Marques, who flew with the message: “Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium”, written by the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc. 

Three years later, in January 2023, we gathered once again for The Alfarcito Gathering, as national and international geopolitical and commercial interests continue to pressure the basin. Faced with the worsening of the climate crisis and the urgency of the energy transition, the communities’ message is clear: We no longer want to be a sacrifice zone. The Global North’s “green” transition cannot reproduce the same extractivist, neocolonial politics that have been imposed on the Peoples of the South, amplifying social, ethnic and environmental inequalities. During this encounter, the indigenous communities declared their ancestral lands as a Subject of Rights. The Rights of Nature movement is striving for rivers, lakes, and mountains to bear legal rights in the same, or at least a similar, manner as human beings. We must listen to the voices of the territories, in defense of water, salt flats and the commons, for an ecosocial energy transition!

Aerocene is an era-in-the-making, a community, a non-profit foundation.