ABOUT THE SERIES

The photographic cycle The Lithium Road unfolds one of the
key paradoxes of the contemporary world: the transition into an age of
electrification that promises decarbonization and technological progress, while
simultaneously raising new questions of exploitation and power. At the center
of the project is lithium, the raw material that enables battery systems and
thus contemporary mobility, communication, and energy storage. Although
invisible in everyday life, it shapes the infrastructure of a world emerging
before our eyes.

Through his photographs, Krivic traces the path of this raw
material across a complex global network of interests from the early stages of
prospecting and financial investment in North America, through the South
American salt flats where extraction reshapes the landscape, to Asian
industrial complexes and European recycling plants. The cycle concludes in
Northern Europe, where electric mobility has become part of everyday
infrastructure. This dispersed geography reveals that lithium is not merely a
chemical element, but one of the carriers of contemporary economic and
political tensions. Rather than offering moralizing judgments, the photographer
opens a space of tension between promise and consequence and also between the
vision of clean energy and its material realities. Industrial interventions in
sensitive ecosystems, transformed landscapes, and communities embedded in
global capital flows demonstrate that the energy shift does not signify an exit
from systems of dependency, but rather their restructuring. Electrification
reduces emissions, yet simultaneously redistributes control over resources and
creates new strategic centers of power.

The industrial landscapes in Krivic’s photographs are
therefore not merely documented, but visually reconfigured. Carefully
considered compositions, striking contrasts, and controlled overexposures
create images that at times appear almost painterly. Light shapes spatial depth
and emphasizes the materiality of the sites, while dust, haze, and reflections
soften the edges of reality, lending it an almost surreal quality. Perspective
often blurs the boundary between the figurative and the abstract, as machines,
infrastructure, and human figures transform into rhythmic structures of lines
and fields of color that verge on abstraction. From a distance, the photographs
exert a powerful impact, functioning almost as large-scale color compositions.
As we approach them, layers of detail emerge, gradually revealing contextual
content with traces of labor, materiality, and intervention in space. It is
precisely this oscillation between monumental impression and intimate reading
of detail that builds their expressive force.

The Lithium Road positions the viewer as an observer who
gradually uncovers the broader context of the depicted scenes. Each battery
proves to be the result of a complex process from the extraction of raw
materials and physical labor to transportation routes and economic and
political decisions. Krivic’s panoramic compositions emphasize spatial
vastness, yet consistently situate within it a human figure or the trace of
human activity. In this relationship between landscape and individual scale,
sustainability emerges as a structural and not merely technological issue. In
selected photographs, lithium thus appears not as a univocal symbol of
progress, but as the material condition of the contemporary energy paradigm: it
enables the transition to an electrified future, while revealing that even the
most advanced solutions remain embedded within existing relations of power and
responsibility.