Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai
Desert of the Future
Artist Talk
Saturday, October 10, 2026 @ 3pm
BoxoPROJECTS 62732 Sullivan Road, Joshua Tree, CA 92252

In preparation for their residency at BoxoProjects in February 2027, Prima is coming to Joshua Tree to introduce their practice and invite participants to join in their residency project. From communal meals to discussing themes of belonging and diaspora to a year-long study group, Prima’s practice explores belonging and place-making for those whose relationships to land cannot be contained by citizenship or national belonging. Instead of asking who has the right to belong to a nation, Prima is interested in how people create a sense of place through memory, kinship, migration, and other relationships to land.

Within this series of queries, Prima’s residency project, Desert of the Future, raises the question of what constitutes a utopian community. Using the historical failure of the Llano del Rio socialist commune (1914) and the contemporary Transition Network in Joshua Tree as regional case studies, Prima will facilitate weekly workshops for community members to imagine and implement their own ideal community. Instead of focusing on inventing new social structures, Prima proposes that participants deconstruct notions of time and productivity, and renew their relationship to Nature and myth as ways to engage with the utopian. The culmination of the residency is a public event, transforming the residency space into an experimental theatre piece where participants perform roles within their envisioned utopia.

The workshops will be accompanied by reading materials and participants will be engaging with the workshops for a minimum of ten hours over a four week period. A stipend will be provided. This artist talk will be an occasion to meet Prima and ask questions on how you would like to be involved in the project!

Biography
Born in 1989, Bangkok, Thailand, Prima earned a Visual Arts Degree (Diplome National des Arts Plastiques) from the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes Metropole, a License in Film Studies (Licence en Cinema et Audiovisuelle) at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. They completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 2013 and obtained a Master of Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA in 2017. They currently live and work in St Paul, Minnesota.

Artist website