Deserts Oceans Deserts (2025) "on" MOCA in LA, California_ by Amigo
Deserts Oceans Deserts (2025). An environmental installation/sonic exploration of wet and dry epochs “on“ the “place” where MOCA is currently sited in Los Angeles, California.
Cristian Amigo: Composer, designer, and sound artist.
Goldie: Visuals
The Project:
In California, the current moment is one of extreme dryness, and the cultural discussion around climate change is that of dryness, increasing heat, and the eventual return of the Southern California space that MOCA resides on to an empty (in human terms) desert. The recent 2025 Palisades and Eaton wildfires are the latest manifestation of this current dry epoch.
Beginning 480 million years ago, the geologic area where MOCA currently sits, plus much of present day California, Nevada, and New Mexico, has been immersed six times under six different oceans (Sauk, Tippecanoe, Kaskaskia, Absaroka, Zuñi, and Tejas cratonic sequences), each ocean (wet) washing over the land and then receding again eventually leaving dry land behind (in a continuum between wet dry wet...); these oceans and, eventually deserts, lasted hundreds of millions of years.
The relationship between water, environment, and biological life has a history and record in geologic sequences. The Sauk, whose sediments can be found at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, is the first of these oceans and the fossils from its deposits are the first geologic register of life on earth.
The geo-located installation:
My sound compositions are placed in the womb, the portal, and entrance to MOCA that both opens (entrance) and closes (exits) the formal museum space. Physically, it resembles a cave and gives a heightened impression of immersion that works with my compositions to immerse the listener in sound and contemplation. It also serves as shade during part of the day. And this alternation between sun and shade works as a physical metaphor for the binary of wet/dry. it is an immersive threshold.
My ecologically-based theme encourages people to think about the space where MOCA currently resides, not as an exclusively dry space in urban Downtown Los Angeles, but one that has, in geologic time, moved between extreme wet and dry environments. It encourages thinking beyond human time.
In the present moment (2025), human-induced climate change increasingly threatens the ecological life of the earth, including human life. This is a science.
MOCA is not an official sponsor of this piece, but we would be happy to have their, or your, sponsorship and commission support to make 9 more soundscape pieces that would bring the total to 12 different soundscapes, each one representative of the 6 dry and wet cratonic sequences experienced on the physical geography of what we now know as California.
Metaphors for meditation on the experience:
Impermanence
Wet and dry
Flood and famine
Absence and abundance
Positive and negative
Emptiness and form
Life and death
The present and future
What can we do?
Thinking: DRY\_anthropocene\_shelter, tools, work.
