Tierras raras (Rare earths) seems like a beautiful way to describe our sinister world. A way to imbue what could be seen as nothing more than catastrophe with mystery, fable, even mythology. In reality, it is a poetic exercise, the magic of naming by a Russian chemist who grouped together some strange minerals and introduced them into the periodic table when time was still measured in centuries, without imagining that these minerals would become the main fuel for the technology industry of his future and our present, and that the words he chose would synthesise, like a spell or an exorcism, an entire era. Rare earths.

Beauty survives destruction, its fragility intact. Like Anna Tsing’s fungus, or the wild animals of Chernobyl, or the free light that could illuminate all of Mexico City thanks to the gases emitted by the rubbish buried in the Bordo Poniente landfill. If we dig into the earth, with our nails, drilling machines and specialised brushes, we will find rubbish, the excrement of the world, the scatological traces of history: household waste, mining residues, prehistoric tools and obsolete computers, fragments of bodies, rubble from temples destroyed in wars, icons sacrificed by spiritual enemies. Tierras raras ( Rare earths) is an image, a glimpse of that condensation of time. The dance of the subsoil, of what decomposes and feeds the world. The dance of that original violence.

Tierras raras (Rare earths) is a ceremony in which matter is transformed: bodies, their voices, space, their sound. It is a work about the earth’s crust, where the world’s dead are buried, along with their belongings and cities buried by natural disasters, and which is itself the source of technological progress and the supplier of its hopeful and reckless Promethean dreams.