In recent years, Coachella has increasingly become a feed-driven event — an endless stream of coordinated outfits, TikToks with real-time recaps, and scandals capable of overshadowing the festival’s original purpose: art, music, and the desert spaces of the Coachella Valley. And yet, despite all the background noise, there are still installations that continue to captivate us. Let’s take a look at some of them.

For the 2025 edition of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the art program — curated by Public Art Company (PAC) together with Paul Clemente, long-time art director at Goldenvoice — presents an intimate dialogue with nature, especially with the wind, light, and desert sand.

Isabel + Helen Studio at Coachella

Bringing a pervasive energy, suspended between nostalgia and ingenuity, is Isabel + Helen Studio with Take Flight, an installation that imagines what might have happened if 19th-century dreams of human flight had taken shape in the Californian desert. Giant turbines spin slowly, moved by the wind, while two skeletal bicycles wander through the festival like relics from an aviation that never came to be. By day, the piece evokes a machine abandoned by time; by night, it becomes a luminous, ghostly creature celebrating the beauty of visionary gestures — even when they remain unrealized.

Stephanie Lin and her cilinders

Among the installations that draw the most attention is Taffy by Stephanie Lin. Seven cylindrical towers, as light as tents but as majestic as totems, dance with every gust of wind. Their mesh covering creates optical illusions in constant motion, while the colors — inspired by mid-century desert modernism — reflect and absorb light depending on the time of day. There is nothing static about Taffy: it is a temporary architecture designed to shift and change, a shelter inviting you to pause and dissolve for a moment in the enchantment of the landscape.

Uchronia’s Grand Bouquet

Uchronia completes the trio with Le Grand Bouquet, a surreal field of inflatable flowers as tall as buildings, translucent and pulsing with light. Their giant petals provide shade from the sun while creating a dreamlike, mirage-like landscape. It’s a fleeting springtime that blooms beneath these flowers — full of nostalgia, play with light, and a general sense of suspension. A moment of collective stillness before returning to the euphoric chaos of a festival that, sadly, no longer seems to be what it once was.

ph. courtesy Lance Gerber