In 2007, I stumbled upon a peculiar image in a bookstore: an Airstream trailer sitting in a puddle of toxic pink liquid. This photograph appeared on the cover of Kim Stringfellow’s book about the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland body of water (Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape.)
Sunset at The Salton Sea. Photo by Tao Ruspoli.
I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this place, despite it being just a three-hour drive from my home in Los Angeles. Intrigued, I immediately drove to investigate. (For anyone also unfamiliar with the Salton Sea, it was born from an engineering disaster in 1905 when Colorado River water breached irrigation canals and flooded the Salton Sink for two years. By the 1950s, developers reimagined this accident as opportunity, creating a booming resort destination that attracted celebrities and tourists with promises of a “desert riviera.” But environmental realities couldn’t be marketed away. As agricultural runoff increased the sea’s salinity and pollution, massive fish die-offs began in the 1970s. What was once marketed as paradise became increasingly uninhabitable, with most residents and businesses eventually abandoning the area.)
Circling the lake and arriving at the eastern shore, I passed through strangely named settlements: Mecca, North Shore, until finally, thinking there would be nothing more but desert on my left and this surreal, eerily still body of water on my right, I saw a sign reading “Bombay Beach: 8 miles.” As I approached, a giant cell tower appeared, followed by a perfectly square grid town with only one street off Hwy 111, that served as both entrance and exit.
My first stop was the Ski Inn, a bar whose name made little sense until I realized people once water-skied right up to it. Walking through town, I discovered 90% of the approximately 700 lots were not just abandoned, but teeming with trash, as well as beautiful vintage trailers rotting into the salty ground. The bar walls were papered with thousands of dollar bills. A handful of elderly residents sat drinking. I fell madly in love with how strange this little town was—not completely abandoned, but rather maintained by 100-200 eccentric souls. By 2011, I had purchased my first home in Bombay Beach and began bringing others to experience it.
Places like this inspire creative and philosophical thoughts precisely because they exist outside the homogenized, corporate American landscape subtly and systematically designed to discourage creative or rebellious thinking. The dominant systems of capitalism rely on standardization, predictable consumption patterns, and the elimination of spaces that might foster alternative ways of being. Bombay Beach stands in stark opposition to these forces–not only to bland suburban developments and corporate office parks, but also to places like Venice Beach—a place I had recently escaped, where countercultural aesthetics have been co-opted to sell ‘wellness’ and ‘authenticity’ through expensive grocery stores, exclusive yoga studios, and curated experiences. While these commercialized bohemian enclaves preach liberation and self-discovery, they ultimately reinforce the same ego driven, consumeristic, self-optimization logic of the rest of capitalist society. I came to see Bombay Beach, with its decay and apparent abandonment, refused both the sanitized corporate landscape and the profitable performance of ‘alternative living’ as offering instead a genuine space for communal experimentation unbounded by market imperatives.
As someone passionate about phenomenology and applied philosophy, I also recognized that this marginal space offered an opportunity to reconnect abstract thinking to concrete reality. I began bringing more friends to Bombay Beach, including philosopher Mark Wrathall, then a professor at UC Riverside (now at Oxford). We agreed this strange place inspired profound philosophical and political questions.
Over time, we developed a motto that captures the paradoxical wisdom of Bombay Beach: “The Less Sense it Makes, The More Sense it Makes.” We rendered it in Latin—”Minus Sensus Facit, Magis Sensus Facit”—both as a playful academic gesture and a recognition that sometimes ancient languages can capture truths that everyday speech cannot. This motto embodies our embrace of contradiction as a pathway to truth, a philosophical position with deep roots in dialectical thinking.
Contradiction isn’t something to be resolved through synthesis, as a superficial reading of Hegel might have it, but rather a productive tension to inhabit. Bombay Beach exists in numerous contradictions: it’s simultaneously decaying and regenerating, isolated yet intensely social, absurd yet profound, playful yet serious, dystopian yet utopian. When conventional logic fails, as it so often does in our complex world, embracing contradiction offers a deeper, subtler understanding.
Bombay Beach, with its very existence as a failed resort town that somehow persists, offers a lived experience of contradiction. It’s a place where abandoned, forgotten dreams reveal new possibilities, where ruin inspires creation, where marginality becomes centrality.
“What would it take to do a philosophy conference here?” I wondered aloud to Professor Wrathall on one of our early trips there. “Not much,” he replied, a bit skeptical. “Philosophers love to talk, so if we invite them, they may come.” I wanted to liberate philosophical thinking from the gated communities of academia, forcing it to confront the material conditions of precarity, environmental devastation, and community resilience that Bombay Beach embodied. Living a liberated life requires engaging in philosophical inquiry, whether one recognizes it as such or not.
Philosophers meet at The Bombay Beach Museum of Bombay Beach. Photo: Tao Ruspoli. Light sculpture by Brandy Eve Allen.
Simultaneously, I witnessed the cultural extractivism taking place as artists visited Bombay Beach to shoot music videos and fashion spreads—essentially participating in “poverty porn.” They were afraid to engage deeply or to stay, extracting aesthetic value without reciprocity in a place that had already suffered tremendous extraction. This pattern mirrors the broader capitalist cycle: resources extracted, communities exploited, then abandoned when no longer profitable. The challenge became clear: how could we instead create a model of cultural regeneration and reciprocity?
In 2016, along with Stefan Ashkenazy and Lily Johnson White, we co-founded the Bombay Beach Biennale both as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the elitism of the international art world and in an earnest desire to elevate Bombay Beach in the eyes of the residents and the world at large. We brought high art—opera, ballet, large-scale installations, and philosophy conferences—to a town of rotting trailers by the Salton Sea, deliberately inverting expectations of where “culture” belongs. What began as a 24-hour experiment grew into a weekend, then a season with celebrations at beginning and end, all of which helped put Bombay Beach on the international map.
The Biennale rejected market-based models by maintaining two radical principles: no tickets and no commerce. Initially, we playfully subverted the very meaning of ‘biennale’—traditionally an event occurring every two years—by holding our festival annually. Yet in a curious twist of linguistic determinism, the etymology of the name eventually asserted its power over us. As the event grew in scale and ambition, we found ourselves unable to sustain the intensity and resource demands year after year while preserving our core values. By 2024, we surrendered to the wisdom embedded in the name itself, shifting to even-numbered years. Meanwhile, my partner Dulcinée DeGuere and I deepened our connection to Bombay Beach, spending 3-4 months there each year alongside a growing community of artists, thinkers, and locals committed to reimagining what this place could be.
From this foundation, we formalized the Bombay Beach Institute for Industrial Espionage & Post-Apocalyptic Studies as a nonprofit cultural laboratory and think tank. The deliberately provocative name signals our understanding that we live in late-stage capitalism, where environmental collapse is not a distant threat but a present reality, and where creative resistance requires studying the systems we hope to transform.
The Bombay Beach Institute. Photo by Kevin Key.
The name also exemplifies our embrace of contradictions: “industrial espionage” suggests corporate secrecy and competition, while our institute promotes transparency and collaboration; “post-apocalyptic studies” acknowledges that for many communities, the apocalypse has already happened, yet we continue to study and create. The very concept of an “institute” in a place like Bombay Beach represents a productive contradiction between institutional formality and desert anarchy.
In January 2025, the Institute hosted the annual conference of the American Society of Existential Phenomenology (ASEP), a group founded by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. The event brought together leading thinkers in the field in our unlikely desert setting, sparking dialogues between academic philosophy and the peculiar reality of Bombay Beach. Our Board of Directors and Advisors now includes ASEP members Mark Wrathall (officially our Director of Philosophical Operations), TV writer and philosopher Eric Kaplan, and Sean Dorrance Kelly, the Dean of Harvard University humanities, all of whom bring their considerable intellectual weight to our endeavors.
The class disparity became something to address thoughtfully rather than ignore or perpetuate.
This juxtaposition—Harvard deans debating ontology in a desert town where residents often struggle for basic services—exemplifies our commitment to contradiction as methodology. We don’t pretend to be able to fully resolve these tensions, but to inhabit them productively, creating spaces where different knowledge systems can interact without one dominating the other. The academic does not hold authority over the experiential; the theoretical does not supersede the practical. This philosophy translates into concrete action through our comprehensive community engagement. We regularly host community dinners and meetings where philosophical discussions blend with practical problem-solving, creating forums where all voices carry equal weight regardless of academic credentials. Volunteers work directly alongside residents to rehabilitate deteriorating trailers, transforming living conditions while learning from local knowledge about desert survival and resourcefulness. We organize trash collection efforts, leverage our networks to advocate for improved infrastructure, and channel outside resources into the community based on priorities identified by year-round residents. These initiatives aren’t separate from our philosophical project—they’re essential to it, demonstrating that meaningful engagement with contradiction requires material commitment, not just intellectual curiosity. By bringing together high theory and immediate needs, abstract thinking and hands-on work, we create a more authentic space for transformation than either approach could achieve in isolation.
Dulcinée brilliantly describes Bombay Beach as the site where “theory and praxis meet.” Everything she had studied in critical theory suddenly found practical application in this strange desert town. Rather than focusing primarily on the hedonistic or surreal aspects, she recognized the interplay between year-round residents, environmental problems, county governance, and the wealthier visitors who come for the Biennale.
Dulcinée, who serves as Systems Architect for the Biennale and Executive Director of the Institute, brought a crucial perspective: instead of amplifying the spectacle, she has focused on addressing the delicate dance of class, money, and privileged access to creative spaces. She often says, “You can’t just arrive in Bombay Beach and claim theory and praxis are married—you have to get your hands dirty.” This commitment to material engagement distinguishes our work from purely theoretical critiques or purely symbolic gestures.
The conventional narrative about places like Bombay Beach usually falls into two categories: either tragic decay that requires outside salvation, or romanticized ruination that provides aesthetic pleasure for visitors. Both narratives deny agency to those who choose to live there. Our approach rejects these simplifications, instead recognizing the complex interweavings of choice, necessity, resistance, and adaptation that shape any community. Again, we embrace the contradiction: Bombay Beach is simultaneously abandoned and inhabited, damaged and healing, forgotten and remembered.
This season, we launched Convivium, our alternative to the Biennale for odd-numbered years. The name comes from Latin, meaning both “living together” and “a banquet or feast.” It also has a biological definition: when a subset of a species lives in isolation and develops traits that differentiate it from the main population. How perfectly this describes our community and our attempt to evolve alternatives to the dominant culture!
Convivium offered a more intimate, inward-looking experience focused on community rather than spectacle. While maintaining continuities with Biennale traditions—like bringing high-caliber international performances (flamenco this year instead of opera)—Convivium emphasized crowdsourced programming from within Bombay Beach itself, recognizing that transformative ideas often emerge from those most directly experiencing systemic problems.
CONVIVIUM. Photo by Tao Ruspoli.
The name Convivium itself contains contradictions worth inhabiting: it suggests both communion (living together) and exception (biological divergence). It embraces both bodily pleasure (the feast) and development (evolutionary change). Again, these tensions aren’t problems to be resolved but productive spaces to explore. The Less Sense it Makes, The More Sense it Makes.
What makes our work at the Institute particularly meaningful is that it confronts the major contradictions of our time in microcosm. Environmental catastrophe, economic inequality, and social fragmentation are all visible in Bombay Beach. Rather than overwhelming us, and rather than creating, again in Dulcinée’s words, “another escapist utopia on fertile land elsewhere (which often replicates colonial patterns), we’re working humbly and locally to rehabilitate and reimagine a place that industrial capitalism has already damaged and discarded.”
This approach acknowledges our complicity in systems of extraction while attempting to develop new models. As Dulcinée puts it, we’re building “a think tank for local policy decisions” that then hopes to influence broader conversations about community governance, environmental stewardship, and creative resistance to homogenization. We see Bombay Beach as a laboratory for ideas that may prove relevant far beyond our small grid town—a place to develop concrete alternatives to the failing systems of capitalism, extraction, and isolation.
In many ways, Bombay Beach represents the future more accurately than gleaming corporate campuses or tech utopias. It shows us what happens when capitalism abandons a place, when water becomes scarce, when infrastructure fails. Yet simultaneously, it demonstrates human resilience, the possibility of finding joy in difficult circumstances, the potential for community outside conventional structures. Rather than turning away from these contradictions, we face them directly.
In an America increasingly dominated by sameness—where homeowners’ associations dictate acceptable shades of beige and corporate interests flatten cultural differences—the Institute fights to preserve spaces where weird, wonderful things can happen. We aim to nurture the imaginations of those inspired to build alternatives to our current systems. As the planet warms and inequality deepens, spaces like this become not just artistically interesting but politically necessary.
If you’re interested in joining us, visit https://www.bombaybeach.institute/ or email info@bombaybeachinstitute.org. After a decade of experimenting, we’re preparing for the Biennale’s 10-year anniversary in 2026. Between now and then, we’ll continue to develop programming, residencies, and initiatives that blur the boundaries between art, philosophy, and social transformation.
Bombay Beach reminds us that even in the most unlikely places—perhaps especially there—we can find the freedom to reimagine how we live together. The future won’t emerge from boardrooms or think tanks funded by billionaires, but from strange, overlooked places where people gather to create different possibilities. Join us in this beautiful contradiction, this impossible project, this necessary experiment. The less sense it makes, the more sense it makes.
