San Francisco Frontiers - Mirrors, marble and mud: Desert X returns to California

The free event, which drew 600,000 visitors in its last edition, sends contemporary art-lovers on a treasure hunt to find works scattered across the Coachella Valley, some 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Los Angeles.

French-American artist Sarah Meyohas used intricately curved metallic mirrors to reflect and refract the bright desert sunlight, beaming the words "Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams" across the sides of a meandering 400-foot (120-meter) stucco ribbon.

"Truth is definitely something that's at stake in today's world," she explained. "And I try to make art that is not tricking anybody. This isn't a trick. This is the light. And this is true."

Using "caustic" technology based on the way light "plays at the bottom of a swimming pool" to turn sun beams into text, the work speaks to "a world in which we are so politically divided," she told AFP.

- 'Here to stay' -

Twenty miles across the desert, Mexican artist Jose Davila has stacked colossal 16-ton marble boulders that were quarried in the Chihuahua Desert of his nearby home country.

The work is titled "The act of being together."

Arranged to invoke megalithic structures like Britain's Stonehenge, the giant hewn marble lumps also speak to the "current climate of events" in which tariffs have recently been hiked at the US-Mexican border.

"Rocks like these remind us that things are here to stay, and these inconveniences come and go," said Davila.

Still, Desert X artistic director Neville Wakefield conceded that President Donald Trump's tariffs, and Mexican reciprocal measures, had made organizing an art event a two-hour drive from the border "very complicated."

The show brings artists from around the world to make installations specific to the North American desert landscape, sourcing and fabricating many materials from Mexico.

Other installations include Ronald Rael's "Adobe Oasis," which used an enormous robotic arm to 3D-print walls made of clay and straw, in the adobe style traditional in this region.

Rael suggested the ancient building material, which is fireproof, should be reappraised in the wake of the deadly Los Angeles fires that killed 29 people in January.

"This is mankind's oldest building material," modified only by "the introduction of one tool, a robot," he told AFP.

The recent fires "burned buildings that are made of plastics -- toxic materials -- and people in LA still can't drink their own water," Rael added.

Desert X runs until May 11.

C.Diaz--SFF