Juben Rabbani — The Future Was Already Buried Here: Making and Unmaking Futures

Why It Matters

Understanding the layered temporalities of the Salton Sea reveals how EV‑driven lithium projects can perpetuate historic environmental injustices, urging policymakers to embed equity and historical accountability into the clean‑energy transition.

Key Takeaways

• EV lithium extraction promises rapid growth, but masks historic harms.
• Multiple temporalities—geological, colonial, agricultural—coexist in Salton Sea region.
• Power hierarchies prioritize future profit over slower environmental damage.
• Anthropological lens reveals time as a tool of governance and inequality.
• Community voices and slow violence risk being excluded from policy decisions.

Summary

The evening’s presentation introduced Juben Rabani’s exhibition “The Future Was Already Buried Here,” which interrogates California’s Salton Sea (Sultan Sea) as a contested site where lithium extraction for electric‑vehicle (EV) batteries collides with a legacy of water diversion, agriculture, and ecological decline. Rabani, an anthropologist with a decade of consulting experience in the auto industry, frames the exhibit as a visual supplement to his ethnographic research on the energy transition and its uneven beneficiaries.

Drawing on a century‑long anthropological debate about time, Rabani argues that temporalities are not neutral clocks but power‑laden structures. He maps geological time, colonial water histories, decades of irrigated farming, and the accelerated future promised by lithium mining onto the same landscape, showing how each is hierarchized—rapid, profit‑driven futures are foregrounded while slow‑moving harms and indigenous chronologies are pushed to the background.

He cites concrete examples: the early‑20th‑century diversion of the Colorado River that flooded the basin, the subsequent marketing of the Salton Sea as a “French Riviera” and a fish‑stocking boom, and today’s speculative lithium projects that promise jobs and clean‑energy benefits. Rabani emphasizes that “time becomes a medium through which power operates,” and that the future imagined by EV advocates often rests on the erasure of past and present injustices.

The talk concludes that policymakers, investors, and activists must recognize these overlapping temporal orders. Ignoring the slow violence of historic extraction risks reproducing inequities even as the EV transition advances, making community engagement and historical accountability essential for a just energy future.

Original Description

Watson PhD Fellow Juben Rabbani will give a talk about his current Art at Watson exhibition, “The Future Was Already Buried Here: Making and Unmaking Futures in California’s Lithium Valley,” on Tuesday, April 21, at 5:30 p.m. in the Joukowsky Forum (room 155) at 111 Thayer Street.

The exhibition is a visual ethnography composed of 22 black-and-white images shot on 35mm film, which Rabanni processed and printed in a darkroom. Alongside these are digital color images, accessed using a QR code, inviting viewers to move between different visual and temporal registers and consider how obligations to land, life and community are being reorganized through the green-industrial ambitions of the electric-vehicle (EV) transition at California’s Salton Sea.

The work emerges from Rabbani’s ethnographic fieldwork during the summer of 2025 in the Salton Sea region of southeastern California, in partial fulfillment of his anthropology master’s degree requirements.

There will be a Q&A session after the talk, and the exhibition will be available for viewing afterward and throughout the evening.