It wasn’t the fires that forced us to go, we had this trip planned to visit the Salton Sea for some time. We were going to listen to the land. It wasn’t without a tinge of guilt that we were leaving behind a landscape that was screaming for care and concern to visit another that was in living decay. Transient beauty caught between memory and entropy. The tension between natural cycles and human interference, where the deceptive "calm" becomes stagnation rather than renewal. Cyanobacteria, Eutrophication, Anaerobic decomposition, Biodiversity, Evapotranspiration, Desertification. The land speaks of both science and spirit. Wanda Orme, with whom this project is a collaboration, our roles in this ecosystem differed. Wanda gently embraced the land, unafraid of the sedimentation, the hydrogen sulfide, the arsenic, the “black goo”. She accepted the land in all of it’s truths, the death of life did not turn her away as she held it in her hand, cuddling the mud pots, and rejecting the toxic reputation this place had acquired. I on the other hand was more apprehensive in my approach, maybe it was intuitive. Things that are not toxic can still cause harm, I needed to understand before getting my hands dirty. I’m still learning. The land is a being, we are getting to know. We deepen our relationship as we listen more intently, we dig deep both literally and metaphorically, uncovering the layers of identity. Salt crust, algae, black goo, dirt, mud, clay, and far beyond, magma. A paradox of surface beauty and deep, volatile truth.
