Mining nature and humans to death

It is an image that seems to have orig­i­nated in a dystopian sci-fi movie: Greyish brown, muddy earth; a sky buried under an impen­e­trable layer of smog; and in the back­ground, almost unrec­og­niz­able, large smoke­stacks and indus­trial build­ings. Nowhere are people, let alone flora and fauna, to be seen in this life-threat­ening envi­ron­ment. “Tierra de Ciervos” (Land of deer) is the name Argen­tine artist Florencia Levy chose for her photo, which she shot in 2016 from the top of the Weikuang Dam on the outer edge of the Chinese city of Baotou. In 2015, jour­nal­ists labeled the zone surrounded by dams and some eight and one half square kilo­me­ters large where the local indus­tries dump their toxic mining slurry from the rare earth mines nearby “hell on earth” or “the worst place on Earth”.

In 2016, the artist took the oppor­tu­nity afforded by a resi­dency in China to form her own opinion of the place, located in the south­west of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which is in the north central of the People’s Republic, and about 650km from Beijing. It was a research trip that had decid­edly serious conse­quences: Levy was arrested by Chinese secu­rity force agents on the Weikuang Dam, ques­tioned for several hours, and had to delete all the photographs she had taken there. “I thought I was going to die. They thought I was a spy,” she commented in retro­spect in Argen­tine daily La Nación. As if by miracle, one photo survived on the memory card: “Tierra de Ciervos”.

Precisely the regions around the cities of Baotou and Ordos are partic­u­larly disgusting exam­ples of such preda­tory mining of nature. The immense deposits of rare earths discov­ered there are being mined to enable our laptops, Smart­phones, elec­tric vehi­cles, and wind turbines to func­tion. Mining them results in the radioac­tive waste and slurry polluted with heavy metals that gets piped as ‘tail­ings’ into the local arti­fi­cial reser­voir surrounded by the Weikuang Dam. Here, Chinese state capi­talism untram­meled by any civic liber­ties meets up with the legacy of the Soviet Era, whose influ­ence on Inner Mongolia can still be discerned in the archi­tec­ture of Baotou. “What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to domi­nate it and other men,” Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in their well-known essay collec­tion “Dialectic of Enlight­en­ment”, thus describing the ulti­mate conse­quence of unen­light­ened mastery of nature. In this way, Levy’s “Lugar fósil” becomes a swan­song to that (economic) progress which, real­ized as an end in itself, destroys the very basis of life and completely subju­gates humans and the nature that surrounds them. The echo of their lives can only be sensed in the masses of stone in Levy’s filmic work.

Along­side the video, Levy also presents a section from her work “Hundreds of Millions of Years for These Forms”, produced in 2023, which focuses on the phenom­enon of deep-sea mining and is performed by a choir consisting of 12 posthuman enti­ties. The text and the choir struc­ture, created from computer-gener­ated images, motion capture, and record­ings of human voices, is based on inter­views, scien­tific publi­ca­tions, and spec­u­la­tive fiction.