Bombay Beach Biennale: Co-Creating a Cultural Revival at the Salton Sea
High & Dry surveys the legacy of human enterprise in the California desert and beyond. Together, writer Jack Eidt and photographer Osceola Refetoff document human activity, past and present, in the context of future development. Our previous dispatch focused on the lithium boom underway at the Salton Sea.
“Water, water, water... There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
How many times have I read that environmental and social collapse has come to the Salton Sea as it dries in the hot desert sun? On a mission to deconstruct, we traveled to the Bombay Beach Biennale in March 2024 to envision an alternative narrative of artistic community creation that challenges the automatic dystopic nihilism that has flooded our popular culture. Along with photographer Osceola Refetoff, we were recommended to pitch our tent between the Zig Zag House, a mobile home rendered in vibrant lines; and Jeff Frost’s “Transmutation House,” a transformed trailer described as “a time-based painting, photography, sound, and film project that ritualizes the act of creation.”
We were well-placed to ride out three days of co-creation in this circus full of artists, dreamers, thinkers, and what the event organizers call “facilitators of sensitive but provocative interactions.”
Across the way, we discovered the Bombay Beach Institute of Particle Physics, Metaphysics & International Relations (called The Institute). Okay, more mobile homes arranged around gardens of sculpture and desert plants, where food is served free of charge and surreptitious not-quite-metaphysical performances happen late into the night. Somewhere amid the zeitgeist, the physics of particulate matter navigates us seekers to build a community to transcend climate breakdown and socio-suburban disintegration. Thus began our introduction to a creative cultural expression breathing dusty life to the edge of this windblown Imperial Valley lake.
Bombay Beach has evolved from tourist-abandonment as a billboard for a post-collapse future. Artists have installed sculptures with text on the ever-expanding playa, with messages like Keith Jones’s “Help Our Sea” and MIDABI’s “The Only Other Thing is Nothing.”
And most pointed was a poster by Jake Wade that I saw, reading “Beware of Sharks When Diving for Lithium.” Yes, lithium mining has become an important vision for the Salton Sea’s future as we noted in an earlier dispatch. However, the dangers presented by sharks are figurative, and the diving refers to the extraction of brine heated by magma deep underground to obtain the mineral necessary for the future of solar and wind power storage and electric vehicles. And again: water, water, water is key to the success, or the danger like a lurking shark, of this endeavor.
The absence of water, and its occasional flow, have flooded, filled, and evaporated the promise of the human and non-human Salton Sea world, known to geologists as the ancient Lake Cahuilla, on the ancestral land of the sovereign Torres-Martinez Cahuilla Band of Indians.
The present drying phase of this terminal lake, with no hope of refill from the dammed Colorado River, bankrupted the tourism and vacation home push from the last century. Those dreamscapes remain only as rebar skeletons and spray-painted cement wall fragments left to the punishing sun and blowing dust. Yet, the winds of social change and a new creative generation sees something bigger than real estate values here.
Most of the celebrated corvina and Gulf croaker departed in mass-die-offs, suffocated in a salty agricultural fertilizer and chemical stew that remains for the tilapia who are holding fast to what still is California’s largest lake. Pacific Flyaway migratory bird flocks still linger in the drying mudflats with the same hope for sustenance as Osceola and I in our investigations for the way forward here. Instability is the name of the environmental game here and survival is imperative.
Consider that Bombay Beach, during the wet wonder years played the role of fancy Palm Springs Beach Resort for the Sinatra crowd, and one today encounters ghosts of that era on every sandy street of the square-mile town grid. But the abandoned sense of no-place presented a community art regeneration challenge for part-time resident cultural promoters, including filmmaker Tao Ruspoli, philanthropist Lily Johnson White, and hotelier Stefan Ashkenazy.
This artistic re-imagination project “at the literal edge of Western Civilization” could only exist in this kind of forgotten town with founders motivated to learn lessons from impolitic gallery gentrification and the fatal excess of Burning Man festivals. In my formative years in Los Angeles, we used to find this renegade creative spirit in all-night raves hidden from the authorities in the mostly-abandoned downtown warehouses, before real estate developers amped their value as live-work spaces and dubbed it the Arts District.
Bombay Beach’s degraded trailers and vacant lots set against an evaporating sea and growing playa have been reconsidered as a giant open-air canvas for cultural creation and artistic expression. Long-term locals have integrated somewhat into the vision and established an art movement, in full display.
“Our vision here is to illustrate the intrinsic value of art, music, and philosophy to make tangible change. How does art transform a community? It creates more community, brings people together in meaningful ways to create something unexpected and beautiful. I've never seen it anywhere else in the world where people can gather to see top-tier opera, next to an Oxford philosophy professor, next to a woman who didn't even know she was an artist, spending her life cutting out butterflies and putting them all over her house. Her name is April, and she is an amazing local woman who has emerged as an artist through this process.”Tao Ruspoli, Bombay Beach Biennale co-founder
The three-day Biennale, named tongue-in-cheek after Venice, Italy’s annual cultural gathering, included street theatre and dance performances, open gallery exhibits, environmental chats on the future of the Salton Sea, circus acts, film screenings, eclectic musical improvisations, and all-night dancing. To transcend the trappings of commercial art festivals, they don’t charge for entry, free food was plentiful, and the promotion was limited to word of mouth, at least sort of. In this way, every attendee is considered a community accomplice, with a myriad of ways to contribute to the experience.
In this regard, according to Biennale co-founder Lily Johnson White, they have collaborated on a community revitalization that includes trash collection, street lighting, fire and medical services, artists grants and residencies, multiple museums, and a budding sense of place. And she further stressed that education of people regarding the issues around the Salton Sea lithium boom and environmental crisis is a central role of the project. Above all, they look to connecting that to the awe, wonder, and curiosity of experiencing the desert landscape.
Picture "West Side Story" danced live to a hearty windblown orchestra, designated “Bombay Does Broadway,” at the convergence of streets 4th and E. A half-hour later, we piled into a crowd gawking at an operatic rendering of “Musette’s Waltz” from La Bohème. Many climbed on top of someone’s parked truck about to creak over to catch a glimpse as the shadows of night overtook us all amid DayGlo lighting and spectators of all ages, some dressed to party, others to keep warm.
Kim Stringfellow, a research-based artist who creates what are called transmedia experiences with her Mojave Project, presented during the Biennale on the lithium boom, and what many call the Salton Sea’s “Lithium Valley.” She highlighted the group of young volcanoes located between the San Andreas and Brawley fault zones: the “Salton Sea Known Geothermal Resource Area.”
This is also considered a sacred site and location of the Creation stories to the Indigenous inhabitants around Obsidian Butte. The area now produces about 400 megawatts (MW) of renewable geothermal electricity round the clock at its 11 power plants with the potential to generate up to 2,950 MW.
The super-heated, high-pressure geothermal brines pumped from the deep deposit below the Salton Sea produce “flash-steam” that powers the electrical turbines. These extremely hot and corrosive brines in massive quantities of water contain enough dissolved lithium to produce over 382 million EV batteries.
The complicated proprietary technology called Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) is now being developed by a handful of companies with the goal of bringing DLE to commercial scale to tap into this vast resource. While this process is considered one of the least environmentally impactful methods to mine lithium, many questions remain. The more Osceola and I delve into the question of Lithium Valley leads us to consider figurative sharks circling in the waters below. More on the lithium boom and its implications in a later dispatch.
When we broke down our tent next to the Zig Zag House, we shared the conviction of the social sculpture in process, the undercurrent of de-commodified rebellion made surreal. The rain and freshwater flow will never arrive here, and the volcanic powers from below the Salton Sea make the lithium boom an uneasy solution to Help Our Sea. Water will be the final arbiter there too. The words on MIDABI’s text installation remind us “The Only Other Thing is Nothing" (see below).
Heading back to Los Angeles after the wild weekend, I can’t help myself but feel this sense of optimism. How the moon shimmered in the windblown sky as we climbed out of the dance floor dug into the playa at the Sub-Club. And the amazing people we sat with, excited and committed to share their visions of art and community.
I left feeling that no matter how dire our environmental and societal collapse get, the fringe players, a person with creative intents, a welding torch and discarded rusty steel; a woman painted in sparkly blue doing beach acrobatics for a cheering crowd; there are those who step up and re-create the way forward. From the frame of Bombay Beach, dry as it is, we might have just enough water, like Edward Abbey said, for all of us.
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