Brown Watson Institute

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

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.