Iván Argote: A Point of View

Production | Exhibition Grant

Iván Argote’s (b. 1983, Bogotá) A Point of View enacted a sculptural intervention into a man-made crisis on the shores of the Salton Sea. Presented by Desert X, Argote’s installation gave audiences the opportunity to contemplate California’s largest and most endangered lake from multiple perspectives. Six sets of concrete staircases topped with viewing platforms drew wider attention to an ecological disaster that poses urgent health risks and has, for decades, been experienced only by the local residents—human, animal, and vegetal—of the Coachella Valley. Messages set in concrete appeared in Spanish and English on each step. From the platforms the audience could communicate with each other or turn to the landscape. A Point of View invited both visitors and local community members into a poetic and uncertain encounter with the evaporating lake. Appearing both modern and archaic, these staircases invoked brutalist architecture as well as the ancient tradition of Aztec earthworks, structures built to bring humanity into commune with the cosmos. Seashells and imprints of centuries-old marine life littered the immediate vicinity of A Point of View, whose viewing platforms provided a vista onto the diurnal, geologic, and mechanized nature of time along the San Andreas Fault.