Contemporânea

17 Ubiquitous Elements of Domination

The Grip of Rare-Earth Extractivism on Lands, Lives, and Dreams   

Otobong Nkanga emerges onto a darkened stage, a metallic table balanced like a tutu around her waist. The table lights up with phrases while the artist beckons the audience in her performance Glimmer: Aurum (2013), finally proclaiming the pleasure of “working in concert with minerals, memories and the desire to draw on the infinite resources of their combined energy.”1 Instead of this beauty of working together, mineral resources plague human and more-than-human lives like a toxin in the hands of an addict. Our system’s compulsive obsession with minerals has driven extractivism to take on its most perverse form of colonial, racial, and ecocidal violence on one side, and addiction to instant gratification, unsustainable comfort levels, and continuous optimisation on the other. The latest techno-obsession of the global market—and consequently geopolitics and conflict-drivers—are rare-earth elements, or rare earths.

Rare earths point to the entanglement of contemporary life, constituting “a fertile ground upon which to begin an exploration of the contemporary,” to quote Nadim Samman, one of the curators of TBA21’s show RARE EARTHS (2015).2 Having spent the last few months researching rare earths, I’ve found myself seeing our entanglement with these elements wherever I turn. Their presence is always followed by the shadow memory of their violent extraction. A sort of spice for technology, rare earths are used in small quantities in pretty much all technologies that drive our comfort- and safety-obsessed society: from microwaves, screens, and LEDs to gigantic data centres, military jets, and the latest MRI technologies. Rather than being the basis of these technologies, rare earths augment existing qualities of metals, withstand nuclear radiation, accelerate conduction in wind turbines and electrical vehicles, enable miniaturisation of our devices, and clarify the sounds of speakers or the colours of screens that drive our tech addiction.3 In other words, technological design choices driven by ubiquity, control, and optimisation are made in expectation of the elements’ ready availability, regardless of social and ecological costs.

Rare earths are anything but rare: just as their use in technology is dispersed across the contemporary, so is their natural availability dispersed across the Earth’s crust, with small quantities enmeshed with other ores, metals, and radioactive elements. This means that their extraction entails environmental destruction on a massive scale, from both mining and refinement. The ecological devastation is well-known: for example, the Mountain Pass mine in California, once responsible for most of the world’s rare-earth supply between 1965 and 1995, closed in 2002 due to a toxic spill.4 In China, which now controls the global supply chain of rare earths, refining 90% of supplies and mining 70%, mining regions in Mongolia are notorious for sky-rocketing crop, animal, and human death tolls due to poisoned water and soils.5 With new technologies in military, data and energy provision relying increasingly on rare earths, and China’s dominance of both market and know-how, we are now witnessing a gold rush that affects geopolitics world-wide, threatening mountains, waters, and lives in Greenland, Brazil, India, Australia, Malawi, Zambia, and South Africa, to name a few.6 As artist Ndidi Dike puts it, “We are all witnesses of the recurring spectacle of world leaders debating, haggling, bargaining, and cloaking rare earths, critical minerals, and trade war tariffs being bartered for security and economic development in the language and rhetoric of peacebuilding, played out on the chessboard of extractive capitalism.”7

A Chessboard of Extractive Capitalism Where Efficiency Plays the Queen

The Anthropocene has, in the words of T.J. Demos, “become fully instrumentalised by technocratic neoliberalism … [justifying] all manner of disaster capitalism and its techno-fixes.” He points here to the absurdity of entrusting the very technofeudal actors that caused the ecological crisis in the first place with the mission to solve it. Having previously put money above all else, the racist capitalist system continues to do so with its new fixes.8 As Kair and Jodi Dean sharply remark in “Revolution or Ruin,” there is a lot of money to be made in a warming world.9

Quite a lot of this money can come from rare-earth mining, as these elements are increasingly used to make energy supply technologies more efficient. This includes older technologies, such as scandium and lutetium in oil refinement, but also newer ones, with lanthanum being used as a nickel alloy to store hydrogen gas in hydrogen-powered vehicles and in hydride batteries in hybrid cars, and promethium to make phosphors emit light in solar cells. Perhaps most significantly, neodymium and dysprosium are used to make permanent magnets that can withstand high temperatures and are employed in wind turbines, motors, generators, and electric cars.10 As such, the use of rare earths in “clean energy” or the “green transition” serves to justify their extraction no matter the cost for humans and more-than-humans. Here, they form part of a wider extractivist system: as Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires: A Geneology of Technology and Power since 1500 (2023) shows, rare earths are part of an ongoing “planetary mineral cold war” where they form a triangulation with the lithium triangle and that of industrial metals, driving bloody regional conflicts and exploitation.11

While Calculating Empires forms an encyclopaedic, rationalised work that speaks to the entanglement of different strains of contemporary power and domination, works such as Ndidi Dike’s Rare Earth Rare Justice (2025) take a more emotive approach. It is designed as a topography with raw, tactile surfaces and pigments that speak both to the colours of the resources and the red, blue, and white flags of imperial flags. Rare Earth Rare Justice is focused on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where wars over resources have created one of the deadliest conflicts in world history, taking over six million lives in the past 30 years;12 the show’s “mine/mindscape” refers to “the tectonic deformation of wealth and poverty from resource-war exploitation. Beneath the surface of this landscape of exploitation lingers the underworld: echoes of immense suffering and immeasurable ecological costs.”13 These echoes are visually represented through installations that act as post-colonial memory-making, using sculptural Igbo techniques and found/re-purposed objects: a monumental sculpture shaped as something between a bullet and the classic slave ship plan is made out of c. 900 autopsy headrests (normally used in morgues), and nearby a wheelchair made out of bullet castings. The accompanying sound of currency counters serves as a reminder of what it really is all about.14 In the words of Adelaide Bannerman, rare earths “emerge [in the exhibition] as ethical conditions: the echo of empire in mineral veins, the spectral labour that fuels global technology, the quiet complicity between foreign capital and local governance … [as] power, profit and silence form a shared mineral logic.”15

Rare earths serve, for Ndidi Dike, as a way into understanding the race for extraction that ravages the DRC, whose main driver today is the so-called “critical” mineral cobalt,16 which (together with rare earths neodymium and dysprosium) is used in lithium-ion batteries, i. a. in electric cars.17 Dike is not the only artist to align the global hunt for “critical” minerals such as lithium, copper, and cobalt with the rush for rare earths: Rosell Meseguer’s project Rare Earths Elements (2017–2019) similarly compiles rare earths and “critical” minerals of the periodic table into dictionaries on geology, economic theory, and political ecology. Stones, drawings, photographs, maps, and ledger books painted with pigments of the minerals’ colours chart their histories throughout the exhibition.18 The shared use of both “critical minerals” and rare earths in techno-solutions for the ecological crisis, combined with predicted supply-chain bottlenecks, act as justification for violence that, time and time again, impacts Black and Indigenous people the most.

Continuing this history of racial violence are, for example, rare-earth mining projects in Angola, Malawi, and South Africa, where Australia, China, the EU, Japan, and the U.S. are major investors.19 All these are recent, with Africa’s last rare-earth mine, British Rainbow Mining Burundi’s Gakara project in Burundi, closing in 2021, when President Évariste Ndayishimiye suspended mineral exploitation by foreign companies, stating that the agreements were plundering the people of Burundi and needed to be renegotiated. Meanwhile, the country continues to grapple with 90% of the population living below the poverty line, corruption scandals, artisanal mining, and resource smuggling from neighbouring DRC, where the Ndayishimiye’s government is heavily involved in the civil war.20

While the news cycle tends to obscure these conflicts as matters concerning specific geographies, markets, and interests, artistic responses speak of the planetary and racist nature of extractivist violence. Otobong Nkanga’s work in tapestry, installation, and performance speak to the transformations of raw materials for industrial use while leaving deep scars in mountains and collective memories.21 Denise Ferreira da Silva understands Nkanga’s In Pursuit of Bling (2014) as discerning how material commodities nourish global capital built upon juridical and economic architectures of colonial and racial violence. In her essay response, she proposes blacklight as a poethical tool that makes visible “the obscurations that are a condition of possibility for global capital.”22 Ferreira da Silva later developed this blacklight concept as a technique for her film with Arjuna Neuman, 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (29’ 10’’, 2018). The film crosses four oceans and four islands to untangle how racialised violence, geological shifts, and material extractivism “displace the privileged role of value in ethics, relations and knowledge.”23 Ndidi Dike’s aforementioned installation Rare Earth Rare Justice similarly juxtaposes images of beauty with realities of global consumption, which continues to violate and dispossess Black bodies while impoverishing lands and ecosystems, thus “revealing not just the mechanisms of power, but also our own complicity, desire, and denial.”24

A parallel violation is unfolding among Indigenous peoples in the North, as the current crisis over Greenland demonstrates. Having focused on two rare-earth deposits in Kvanefjeld and Tanbreez, mining corporations and post-industrial states have been competing to get their share of exploration rights and infrastructural development. Since rare-earth deposits in Kvanefjeld are coupled with uranium—making mining a high risk for radioactive leakage—the Indigenous-led social movement “Uranium? No!” successfully made extractivism an election issue. In 2021, the Inuit Ataqatigiit party won parliamentary elections and reinstated the 1950s ban on mining mineral deposits with uranium, which had been repealed in 2013. The result? The Australian mining company Energy Transition Minerals has taken Greenland’s government to court, where the project remains tied up, demanding compensation of USD 11.5 billion—four times Greenland’s GDP—arguing that the legislation amounts to a de facto expropriation.25

With this reappearance of the ghost of Haiti’s crippling two-century-long debt to France following the Haitian Revolution, escaping the cycle of extraction that is boiling the Earth alive while feeding on Black and Indigenous bodies seems an increasingly hopeless dream. Drawing a parallel between Indigenous bodies and resource extraction, T. J. Cuthand’s film Extractions (16’, 2019) speaks of a booming child apprehension industry, plans for new pipelines, and shared complacency in the ongoing mass extinction event:

But maybe that's what they want us to believe: that this is the end of hope and life and love. That there is no more future for the humans, for the Indigenous people, for people who gotta make babymaking so goddamn complicated. Maybe that's just a ruse so that they can suck out every last drop of blood that this planet has instead of finally finding a way to turn it around. Maybe not having babies makes it easier because if you don't have people who need to be OK then you don't have to worry so hard. Then you can just sit in the air conditioning and just watch Netflix until the power runs out.26

Driven by Desire to Dominate and Conquer Life

What lies beyond the deep implicancy of world domination? What drives and desires have set humanity on a path of technological accelerationism that destroys the very conditions of its existence? Arguing for an expanded view of media culture which includes its material extractivism, Jussi Parikka introduces this desire in A Geology of Media (2015) through Arthur Canon Doyle’s 1928 short story “When the World Screamed.” The story follows Professor Challenger, Mr Edward Malone, and Mr Peerless Jones in a mission to uncover the living organism of the Earth beneath strata of subsoil. Drilling deeper and deeper, they reach where it is “undeniable that even nonorganic matter is alive: ‘The throbs were not direct, but gave the impression of a gentle ripple or rhythm, which ran across the surface,’ Mr. Jones describes the deep surface they found. … [Then,] in one of the most bizarre rapelike scenes in literature … he penetrates that jellyesque layer just to make the earth scream. This scientific sadism echoes in the ears of the audience and much further.”27

This sadistic act of penetration is mirrored upstream in the use of at least twelve rare-earth elements across three key areas of domination: military technology (as physical force over humans), nuclear reactors (as force over the greatest power we know of), and medical devices (as domination over life and death). Promethium is used in guided missiles, praseodymium in aircraft engines, and scandium in fighter planes, while neodymium (with iron and boron) and samarium (with cobalt) are used in permanent magnets on which a significant part of modern defence programmes depend, from military jets to radars, drones, and guided missiles. Neutron absorbers in various parts of nuclear reactors make use of samarium, europium (which incidentally is also used for printing euro banknotes, as it glows red under UV light), dysprosium, holmium, and gadolinium. The latter is also used in MRIs, while thulium and neodymium are used in surgical lasers, with the former also used to make portable X-ray machines—a technology made safer by terbium.28

Through the imaginary minescapes that the domains of military, nuclear, and medical power hold together, we begin to grasp how the ubiquity of rare earths’ tech applications holds the global social order in a tight grip. Of interest here are some artworks that explore humanity’s extreme relationship with mountains and minerals, such as Daniel Mann and Eitan Efrat’s The Magic Mountain (68’ 24’’, 2020). The film explores ambivalent mineral legacies of Bad Gestein, a radioactive site in Austria where the Nazis’ mining project found abused workers being healed by radon gas in the mine; mystic Emma Kunz’s healing with magical stones in the Swiss Alps, whose energies she attempts to use to kill Adolf Hitler; and pearls created from sweat and blood in an underground site used by the Nazi’s during their occupation of Poland. This duality of healing in places of abuse, revenge in sites of healing, and mineral memories forged through violence reflects the equally fraught and intertwined relationship between humans and minerals.

We find here also a reminder of Marina Verzier Otero’s exhibition Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains (Galeria Municipal do Porto, 2023) and publication Flotando en litio (2025). These address a double resistance: against lithium’s use as palliative bipolar medication, and against its extraction as a resource for the car industry to sustain its mobile domination through electric vehicles. While these extractions leave the destruction of ecosystems and livelihoods in their wake, drinking water and hot springs from these mountains have long been seen as healing.29 Here, just as in Efat and Mann’s Magic Mountain, we find memories of softer, non-extractive relations where mountain waters are mystical spaces of rest, care, and healing—a space where humans are “working in concert with minerals,” as Nkanga’s performance puts it.30 Could we find a way to heal our relationship with these mountains, with these elements? A way to heed Ursula K. Le Guin’s call to avoid the tragic, “linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic” that “conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future,” and instead redefine “technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination”?31

Obsession, Addiction, and Compulsive Materialism

If technology is a cultural carrier bag filled with the symbolism of rare earths, its contents are a growing neurosis of obsession, addiction, and compulsion fuelled by the entertainment industry. One of the first applications of rare earths was in fact in the entertainment industry, as an oxylsulfate of yttrium was discovered to intensify the red phosphors of early televisions.32 Like a fly drawn to a flame, this amplification of tone opened up territories of capitalist domination: the mind and body of the consumer. While yttrium in TVs was replaced by the red and blue light created by europium in LCD screens, delivered through erbium-amplified broadband signals in fibre-optic cables, the television and entertainment industry remains one of the largest users of rare earths today. Film production is a heavy consumer too, as scandium and lanthanum are used in studio lighting and artificial sunlight.33

Despite its newfound brightness, the television was not enough to achieve full domination. What was needed, instead, was the miniaturisation of electronics, enabled by samarium-cobalt magnets. Today largely replaced by neodymium magnets, this miniaturisation allowed technology to take on its pervasive cyborg quality.34 Microresearchlab spins this absurdity of extractivism with their project Tiny Mining (2020): “a mineral exploration co-operative and community committed to the open source exploitation of the interior of the human body for rare earth and other mineral resources.”35 Hilarious and insightful, the project offers a strong theoretical grounding that flips anthropocentrism on its head in an excellent critique of extractivism. “We have no desire to carry on extracting resources from an ever-depleted world,” the tiny miners write in the Tiny Mining Sweatshop Reader. They want to dismantle privilege and “become earthy through an equal exposure and accountability for humans’ own practices and desires of exploitation,” while enacting “the desires and fantasies of guilt-free consumption and exploration.”36

The art world, of course, does not come out guilt-free, as projects such as CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE (2013) demonstrate. Created by Jamie Allen and David Gauthier for transmediale at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin, the project is an (an)archival site survey of the resources and reserves upon which the transmediale festival of art and technology is built. Explaining the project, the duo highlight the inherent invisibility of technology: “When something works—really works—it is infrastructure; just as Douglas Adams puts it: ‘Technology […] is «stuff that doesn’t work yet.»’”37 In other words, we are subsumed within infrastructural systems of technology that have been made to disappear, rendering them all the more difficult to resist.

One such infrastructure is the digital realm, which over the past twenty years has shifted from a space of possibility and commons to an addictive Corporate Platform Complex ruled by Big Tech. As Tiziana Terranova explains in After the Internet (2022), this transformation became possible after 1991, when the US government lifted the ban on commercial use of the internet and various capitalist models sought to colonise it. After the 2001 dot-com crisis and a series of software innovations that bypassed commons-based peer production in the mid-2000s, data mining became the dominant commercial model, and the internet became subsumed within the Corporate Platform Complex.38 With data centres relying on elements such as gadolinium, terbium, and ytterbium,39 and tech miniaturisation enabling mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, Big Tech faced no more obstacles to turning us into addicts as part of its financial model.

Looking for Other Futures in Suspended Spaces

With the lexicon of rare earth domination under one arm and the extractivist machinery in the other, humans wielding power, whether great or small, have been cursed with Midas’s wish. Whether seeking instant gratification, a bit of entertainment, health, mobility, wealth, or domination, anything we touch seems to turn into a rare-earth-laced material whose permanent magnetism binds it to the extractivist apparatus. By the time that we recognise how deeply entangled we have become, strapped to a burning, ecocidal planet, we can no longer see ways out.

In its search for a way out, T. J. Cuthand’s Reclamation (13’, 2018) imagines a future in which white people have left for space amidst climate civil wars on a planetary scale. It turns out that, with white people gone, all the Earth needs is time. After painful withdrawals, Indigenous people have healed their addictions to consumerism and social media, spending their days cleaning up the trash. The water has become drinkable again. The air has become breathable. The Earth is slowly recovering.

In a similar vein, Susana de Sousa Dias’s Fordlândia Malaise (40’, 2019) and Fordlândia Panacea (62’, 2025) delve into the story of Henry Ford’s failed rubber plantation town in the Amazon. The town was dreamt up as a utopia of Fordian (authoritarian) industrialism that began by displacing and eventually eradicating the Tupi people who lived there before. The project turned into a major failure: all the trees that were planted died, while the century-old rubber trees remained, and the animals of the jungle posed a deadly threat; “nature reacted … they were expelled from here, by nature itself,” a voice recounts in Fordlândia Malaise. Having sunk a fortune into the project, Ford was eventually forced to abandon it, but the town’s history continued: squatters moved into the houses, and people began to live differently. Combining archival footage and drone imagery with thoughtful, quiet conversations with the town’s inhabitants, Sousa Dias uncovers traces of what other futures might be: a tree nursery project slowly reforesting what was destroyed; people uncovering painted stones and tools of the Tupi people from the depths of Ford’s factory; oral histories of the jungle of the past, and of learning how to live with the wealth around them—"or at least to defend what’s under our feet,” as a voice puts it in Fordlândia Panacea.

Both Cuthand’s and Sousa Dias’s works point to possible futures beyond the obsession with extractivism: futures beyond the ongoing racial domination that subsumes everything it touches. As Sousa Dias puts it, an important aspect of the victory of global capitalism is people’s conviction that there are no alternatives. Travelling to Fordlândia, she found herself in what she calls a suspended space—a space that has already fulfilled its economic, social, and political purposes, thus opening up for other futures. “Speaking with residents of Fordlândia, I encountered a sense of future ability of thinking and envisioning other futures than that which seems inevitable,” she reflects in an e-flux film talk. “People are replanting the Amazonia … writing their own history and, in the process, giving rise to new reactions and methodologies”40—reactions and methodologies that could one day reverberate across the Earth. Perhaps there is still somewhere from which hope can be born. Perhaps not all dreams have been taken over by extractivism for domination. Perhaps it is in these spaces, freed from economic, social, and political purpose, that we can begin to weave new planetary relations with these magic elements deep within the mountains. And then everything can change.