This exhibition is presented across three interconnected layers, where erratic fields—or natural forces and phenomena—overlap with human ecological intervention. Each project originates from a specific microhistory or location in the “Californias” (Baja California in Mexico and Southern California in the US), where the boundaries between nature and political territories intersect.
The first stratum lies beneath the surface and consists of the shifting continental shelf and underlying tectonic plates, whose gradual movement produces the region’s seismic activity. Fault lines, volcanoes, geysers, and underwater phenomena intersect with mineral drilling, energy extraction , and the residues of military testing. In this subterranean landscape, geological time converges with industrial ambition.
The second stratum is the inhabited surface. Defined by agrocapitalism, technological infrastructure, and urban expansion, this is also where animal adaptation, habitat restoration, and the formation of new communities and forms of belonging through migration and settlement occur, and where utopian visions and dystopian realities converge.
The third stratum is the atmosphere: an unstable envelope of wind, oxygen, smoke, and dust that influences physical and psychological landscapes alike. Seasonal fires and airborne pollutants traverse political borders and circulate alongside migrating birds and airplanes, becoming active agents in collective experience.
These projects include recent INSITE commissions—ongoing explorations shaped by sustained research in the local landscape and ecologies—and works realized over two decades ago when site-specificity and border geopolitics occupied different positions within artistic practice and imagination. Together, these artworks trace a narrative of environmental change, political urgency, and cultural imagination in the “Californias".
