read the entire article in print in Issue 2.
Located in Southern California, the Inland Empire is the state’s largest county. It is a dry and desolate area where music festivals happen in its desert, and cacti act as both houseplants and part of a diet to lower insulin levels. The IE has a history of citrus groves, but now features extensive interstate highways. My family and I would make jokes that if we ever wanted to leave the IE, we could take I-10 to Disney World, but that trade-off seemed like swapping a fever dream for a nightmare. However, I-15 was peaceful as it passed Las Vegas and headed north into the unknown. The transformation of citrus groves into warehouses left the county with nothing more than a false sense of security.I can only recall fragments of my childhood there. It was obvious that the economy had forced roads, houses, and highways to be relocated to make way for the monolithic structures. I would see cranes lift huge slabs of concrete to create boxes supported by steel beams. The frames were docile but had a domineering presence, where they would tower over mounds of dirt.
I witnessed the landscape shift as open lots gave way to concrete boxes. Warehouses were not just appearing; they were erupting, uninvited, rearranging roads and entire neighborhoods. The warehouse structures felt like indifferent, yet silent enforcers of a new economy. The memory of those sites returns in splinters, from the smell of asphalt to the metallic shriek of rebar, the surreal quiet when construction paused. That noise, the clash of metal, felt alive, even comforting. In its absence, I find myself turning to the overlooked mechanics of warehouse creation. We consider what it encompasses, including goods, labor, and possibly data, but not how the methods of its construction linger or are recalled in daily experience. What does the warehouse teach us about forgetting? About the aesthetics of efficiency? My attempts at forgetting falter; the scorching scent of liquid tar always recalls the moment the roads were forced into the landscape. The sound of a pen tapping shares similar harmonics to metal clanging. The feeling of remembering is never a ritual done in private but is often involuntary.
From left: Train depot postcard seen in San Bernardino, c. 1930–45, photo courtesy of Boston Public Library; The convergence of Interstates 10 and 15 channels movement in multiple directions. The overlapping network of concrete embodies the region’s circulation of goods. Coolcaesar, Interchangeofinterstate10and15, 2014, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Upon discovering the Radical Research’s Warehouse CITY (communitY Cumulative Impact Tool) dashboard, an that interface shows extant and future warehouse development, I noticed it was continually updating, mapping out the areas where new warehouses were being approved along interstates and train lines. What stayed with me was the realization that pollution was never visible or associated with these warehouses. Yet beneath that rhetoric, communities are told indirectly but unmistakably to forget about harm. Forget that air quality will decline. Forget that truck traffic will warp local infrastructure. Forget that the very jobs being offered are structured to prevent unionization.
Earth Crust Relics is my response to these points, an infrastructure sculpture that engages cultural memory, signals grief, and offers solace in space. Its surfaces reflect the aesthetic of homogeneity, yet at its center lies friction. Warehouses may dominate commerce today, but what if they give way to data centers? Architectures that deplete more than resources, draining communities and people alike. To construct the sculpture, I first needed to ground the work in data that could animate the hidden foundation of Southern California’s warehouse economy. At first, the physicalization wasn’t obvious. I had to pause, shift my thought processes, and reframe my practice. Growing up in IE, I often sought solace in films, and I drew inspiration from dystopian narratives depicted in Alien and Eraserhead. Those worlds, with strange settings but weirdly familiar, echoed what I saw in the present: warehouses carrying a tyrannical presence, both in scale and in silence.
When I was in high school, I worked in a pet store in a suburban shopping mall. I fed snakes and bathed ferrets, dust-bathed chinchillas, and farmed mealworms. I hand-fed baby macaws with syringes and unpacked Styrofoam crates filled with glittering tropical fish. As an animal-obsessed kid, it was a dream job.
read the entire article in print in Issue 2.
Above: Spreads from “Relics of Empire: Visualizing Industrial Desire” from perhaps Issue 2, featuring the Earth Crust Relics sculpture and archival imagery of the Inland Empire.
Nene Villalobos is an artist living in Brooklyn. His work often combines speculative ideas with environmental data as material to examine how information systems shape place, preservation, and collective experience. He is currently pursuing a degree in library and information science at Pratt Institute’s School of Information.
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