In China, in the region of Inner Mongolia, in the industrial city Baotou, an ”artificial” lake has formed. This lake, stretching many kilometers in diameter, is filled with over 180 millions tons of toxic waste and mud. The waste runoff comes from the nearby Bayan Obo mines, which are estimated to contain almost 70 percent of the world’s reserves of rare earth minerals. And it keeps growing. This lake is their residue. The shadow. The separation. The ghost of our digital beings.

I went to where it lives this lake, I was there. I walked along its circumference, meeting its poison, its toxicity. Its radioactivity.

gadolinium,

holmium,

lanthanum,

lutetium.

It lives among beautiful mountains, surrounded by bushes, mud, and in the mud- dogs playing. It is a leaky lake. A leaky poison lake, and somehow, I am left in awe. Flies surrounding it, birds touching it, being touched.

To exist is to trespass—to cross boundaries, to touch and be touched,

(to leak into the world and to let the world leak into you.)

Coming to Baotou, my body reacted in an instant, becoming nauseous, sick. My cheeks flushed red. I saw my hands glittering in the water from the sink, and in all of the dark LED screens- I saw the lake, its black surface reflecting.

(A mirror image, a grand monster, a grand digital monster. And i mean this in the most, loving sense of the word.)

I dipped my hands into the lake and now,

My hands cant stop glittering. I somehow never managed to leave the lake. It haunts me.

praseodymium.

promethium.

This lake, our digital footprint, our embodied ghost– a liminal space, existing in between worlds, neither solid nor liquid. Maggie Nelson writes ‘She told me that pollution too can be worshiped, simply because it exists.’ If we worship our digital devices, can we worship its pollution too?

samarium,

scandium,

terbium.