One of the largest areas outside the reach of State power, Zomia—the mountainous region of mainland Southeast Asia, home to more than a hundred ethnicities. It is today warped by the rapid extension and intensification of the technosphere, which transforms it from a peripheral to a significant geopolitical space. The new planetary paradigm narrows down and isolates rare earth minerals: they are identified as critical raw materials, essential for a multiplicity of advanced technological developments, ranging from medicine to metallurgy and the energy transition, passing through realms as diverse as refrigeration and liquid crystals displays. With the rise of the technosphere, Zomia is transformed into a geopolitical space: conflicts never end. As a semi-autonomous territory run by brutal military regimes, industries are illegal and hardly exist on paper. Rare Earth amplifies the connections between material and meaning. Rare earth, as multiplications, is the Gaia device.

Rare Earth, formed in Supernovae, is deeply intertwined with the processes that led to the formation of the earth and its subsequent geological evolution. Our history is periodised after the materials used for tools and weapons: the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic), the Metal Age (Bronze Age and Iron Age), and the Industrial Revolutions led us into the Atomic Age and Information Age. We are now in the Anthropocene, a rare earth age that bears the energy transition. After coal, oil, and gas, rare earth became the most valuable raw material — the key to humankind’s clean energy future. With these technological adaptations, human society has become more productive and detached from the past.

Rare earth is a substitute in technological development. The rising technosphere makes the biosphere more visible, informational and accessible. From the French Mekong Exploration Commission 1866, southeast Asia massif has been measured, mapped, and visualised. Highland Myanmar becomes a map, a research, a resource, data, a deal, a substitute for Zomia, bearing exchanges. Rare earth substitutes for the mountains' exchanges: jade mining, logging, booming cities with illicit industries, hydropower stations, and opium cultivation. It is the exchange of material, energy, capital, and powers.

Rare earth is a transformation. It is mined by in-situ leaching: Vegetation is removed, and chemicals percolate through—acids, heavy metals, and radioactive elements leak into the soil, ravaging the highlands into a completely toxic land. According to the QGIS detection, by the end of 2023, more than 2,700 leaching pools were found in the Kachin State near the Myanmar-China border. Within a few years, especially since Coup 2021, rare earth mining has exploded so quickly that this mountainous corner of Myanmar has become one of the world's largest supply sources.

Rare earth makes the Highland a deal for China in the global supply chain, an intermediate in the trade, the matter flux. Under China’s ecological civilisation, Myanmar is part of its Belt and Road Initiative, which plans mega-infrastructural projects as part of a China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. China invests in the extraction and gains materials from the mountains. Rare earth intermediates the highland into the global processing architecture, a planetary economy. Under the ground, rare earth is the mining operation in the world; in the earth’s crust, it is a strata. Since Ytterbium was discovered in Sweden in the 18th century, 17 rare earth elements have been found. They are abundant and well-distributed in the crust but typically dispersed and rarely found in concentrations. Therefore, transforming mineral components into chips is complex and highly polluting: one-tone production of rare earth oxides produces wastes, including dust, gas, water, and radioactive residue, nearly ten times the production weight of rare earth oxides. In Highland Myanmar, rare earth is a debris and solution, fuelling this remote, lawless mountainous area; however, it is the tabula rasa for chasing our contemporary dream. Developing clean energy technology has become increasingly crucial: we rush to meet climate goals. According to the IEA, the demand for rare earth elements is expected to reach three to seven times current levels by 2040. Rare earth is a critical material, geopolitical war, and the media for maintaining dreams. It is a haunting structure of power, still on the way to finding the dreamland. In the dreamland, the mountains and people are both the operator and recipient. There is a dream of accessibility, a dream of conquer, a dream of independence and eluding power; a dreamland named Golden Triangle, the world’s largest opium-producing area since the 19th century, under British rule with the international opium trade. The land is the hub, constantly producing tablets and maintaining human dreams.

Rare Earth, Gaia Device. Oscillating the links between science and technology, politics and mining, identity and ecologies, elusions and stability, duration and power, lowlands and hills, energy and dreams.