Hans Baumann: 5 Distillations (Salton Sea)

In 2017, Hans Baumann initiated a long-term artistic collaboration with the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians to measure the disappearance of the Salton Sea from their sovereign tribal lands in the Coachella Valley. Although it is the largest body of water in California, the Salton Sea scarcely registers in the public consciousness and, when it does, it is as a miasmatic blight. By 2030, one-third of the Sea will have disappeared, leaving behind vast expanses of dusty playa contaminated by agricultural runoff and industrial effluents. These low-lying desert lands have been the homeland of the Cahuilla since time immemorial, and the future of the tribal community is inextricably linked to the future of this landscape. This collaboration is an attempt to reflect upon the complex socio-ecological dynamics responsible for the Sea’s existence and to engage with—but not intervene upon—the entropic processes of the Sea’s decline.

5 Distillations (Salton Sea) is a meditation upon time spent in these environs and an attempt to reframe the trajectory of the Sea’s collapse. At nearly 300 feet below sea level, the Salton Sea is a terrain of perpetual accumulation, its topographical confines a microcosm of our planetary future: it is a landscape of hybrid confusion in which intense ecological dysfunction is counteracted by the stubborn vitality of the biosphere. Here, rare birds nest among abandoned household appliances, and innumerable microorganisms prosper in nutrient-rich drainage canals.Stretches of shoreline are covered with the skeletal remains of tilapia from Mozambique, and verdant orchards foreground brown desert mountains. To the Western mind, these moments are unsettling because they are so comprehensively anthropogenic. This is not Nature as we conceive it, and so the Sea’s immense capacity for life is problematized and cast as dysfunctional. Yet the unbalanced ecosystem of the Salton Sea has value;it is not merely a domain of crisis. 5 Distillations (Salton Sea) presents an alternative narrative for this place: a continuum of cultural and physiographic systems with no precise origin, no definitive end and no moral connotations.
 

About the Artist

Hans Baumann is a Swiss-American artist, designer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles.

His work reflects upon ecological collapse, the dynamics of climate change, and the materiality of energy practices. His essays and projects have appeared in a variety of publications, including e-flux architecture, The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land and the Politics of Environment(University of California Press) and Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change (University of Minnesota Press), and his work has been supported by institutions such as the Getty Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Sandbox Films.

Baumann holds degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Prifysgol Caerdydd, and he has lectured throughout the United States and Europe at institutions such as Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), University of Pennsylvania, Universität Bern and Cornell University. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and at ArtCenter College of Design’s Media Design Practices Department. He is a Fellow of the Landscape Architecture Foundation, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar and is a 2024-2025 Fellow of the Howard Foundation at Brown University.
 

Curator

Hans Baumann: 5 Distillations (Salton Sea) is curated by Ciara Ennis, Director and Curator of Pitzer College Art Galleries. Ennis received a PhD in Cultural Studies and Museum Studies from Claremont Graduate University and an MA in Visual Arts Administration, Curating, and Commissioning Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.
 

Related Event

Symposium, “Sovereignty Expanded: Indigenous Geographies of the Contemporary American West”
February 28 and 29, 2020
Benson Auditorium

This event takes place on the ancestral homelands of the Tongva people. Funding generously provided by the Antipode Foundation, the Robert Redford Conservancy and the Office of the Dean of Faculty at Pitzer College.
 

Image Caption

Installation view of Hans Baumann: 5 Distillations (Salton Sea) at Pitzer College Art Galleries, January 25 - March 26, 2020. Photograph courtesy of Ruben Diaz.