“The Future Was Already Buried Here” is a multimedia art exhibition that grew out of Watson School Doctoral Fellow Juben Rabbani’s ethnographic fieldwork in the Salton Sea region of southeastern California during the summer of 2025, where lithium extraction, climate change, and environmental precarity intersect across competing temporalities.

At the center of Rabbani’s research is a simple but difficult question: Who does the electric vehicle benefit?

The black-and-white film photographs of the Salton Sea region, shot on 35mm film and printed by hand, engage with slow, sedimented forms of change, including toxic accumulation, colonial dispossession, geological history, and the boom-and-bust cycles that shape the region. Their material process mirrors these slower rhythms. The digital color photographs reflect the speed of modern extraction and the energy transition, including commodity flows, lithium speculation, electric-vehicle development, and volatile climate events. Viewers access the digital images through a QR code, which activates the same infrastructures of acceleration that organize contemporary extraction.

Through the interplay of these mediums, the project invites viewers to encounter the difficulty of understanding a place where time collapses, and multiple futures are being made and unmade at the same time.

Made possible in part by a grant from the Brown Arts Institute