Delta/Desal is an experimental documentary, currently in production, that explores two linked sites in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands: the Yuma Desalting Plant in Arizona, and the Ciénega de Santa Clara, a wetland in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta.
Built to comply with binational water treaties, the Yuma Desalting Plant operated only briefly; untreated agricultural drainage now continues to sustain the Ciénega, one of the Delta’s last ecological refuges, which supports hundreds of bird species during migration. As drought and climate change intensifies and desalination reemerges as a technological solution, the project asks what is at stake when megastructures intended to solve scarcity threaten ecologies that arise through absence, improvisation, and refuge. The piece moves between these two interconnected sites, tracing how their fates remain in a constant state of risk, suspension, and waiting.
