Liu Yu

Salvation Mountain

Salvation Mountain takes California’s history of the Gold Rush as its starting point. The single-channel video combines drone footage and animations to depict desolate ghost towns and abandoned mining pits of California, leading the viewer through an out of body experience through the vast American landscape. The viewer is taken on a journey, led by the three protagonists–a pioneer, a vagabond, and the avatar of a drone–to Salvation Mountain, a man-made mountain constructed out of latex paint with Christian sayings and Bible verses, and Slab City, a migratory commune in Southern California’s desert. Both communities remain decommissioned and uncontrolled, and there is no electricity, running water, or law enforcement. Delineations of time and history seem to disintegrate as each of the protagonists candidly give insight into their personal history and agendas as they sit around a campfire, revealing California’s past, present, and even future. Liu Yu employs gold as a symbol to explore ideas such as social status, exploration, and settler colonies, prompting us to consider how humans came to shape their world and ideologies around the mining of minerals. Salvation Mountain surfaces the contradictions of a capitalist society, and in particular the phenomenon of the Silicon Gold Rush which has impacted the Bay Area for the last several decades. Liu intersects footage of ungovernable sites in California with tales and aspirations of currency creation and the human faith in objects, posing the question: In the age of late capitalism, how does one achieve absolute freedom?

Salvation Mountain explores the contradictions of capitalist society and in particular the Bay Area, as history repeats itself with the Silicon Gold Rush becoming at once a global site of innovation and high technology and simultaneously one of severe poverty, inequality, and with some of the poorest public infrastructures in the country.