COACHELLA 2025

Art That Breathes in the Desert 

In the beating heart of the California desert, Coachella 2025 once again transformed into an open-air laboratory, where art, design, and technology merged into a symphony of color, material, and movement. Far from being mere decorative backdrops, this year’s art installations became true protagonists, accompanying the stages in a dance between matter and perception. These works invite touch, interaction, and inhabitation: some sway in the wind, others glow from within, many change shape with the shifting light and time of day. 

Vibrant Presences: The Installations 

Playful and monumental, the artworks scattered across Coachella’s grounds never sit still—neither physically nor conceptually. Curated by the Public Art Company in collaboration with Paul Clemente, each installation faces off with the elements, engaging with light, wind, and heat. 

Taffy by Stephanie Lin 

A standout example is Taffy, created by designer and architect Stephanie Lin. Rising from the golden sands like a modernist mirage, Taffy consists of seven slender cylindrical towers, each up to 15 meters tall, that shimmer and shift with the sun’s movement. These elegant, never-static structures vibrate in the desert heat, evoking the fleeting beauty of desert blooms. Beneath them, circular plywood benches invite visitors to pause and reflect, turning the installation into a gathering place and visual meditation.

Le Grand Bouquet by Uchronia 

Le Grand Bouquet is more than just an installation—it's a dreamlike biosphere sprung from the playful minds of the French collective Uchronia. Towering inflatable flowers, each ten meters high, make up a central bouquet surrounded by six satellite blooms, glowing at night with internal lighting that shifts in harmony with the desert sky. By day, their oversized petals offer shade as well as a poetic, visual refuge: an immersion in nostalgia, pop culture, and abstract nature.

Take Flight by Isabel + Helen Studio 

Created by the London-based Isabel + Helen Studio, Take Flight draws inspiration from 19th-century flying machines. Composed of kinetic turbines and skeletal bicycles, the piece—delicate and metallic in form—explores the potential of wind energy and invites visitors to engage with its moving elements. By day, it appears as a mechanical relic unearthed from the sand; by night, it becomes a glowing, almost ghostly turbine. A work that celebrates the beauty of bold failure, of ambition not in success, but in the act of rising. 

Stage Design: An Immersive Spatial Sculpture 

The stage design for Coachella 2025 was led by Vita Motus, a renowned design and architecture studio known for crafting immersive experiences and futuristic scenographies. Vita Motus created the Quasar Stage, a striking triangular structure wrapped in state-of-the-art LED screens that transform the entire space into a "spatial sculpture" of light and motion. This innovative design enabled visually extraordinary performances, with digital chromatic flows that react in real time to sound, creating a constantly evolving audiovisual landscape. 

The installations at Coachella 2025—like its stages—are more than scenography: they are punctuation marks in a visual language that intertwines with the music. Each piece is an invitation to stop, to reflect, or simply to turn into the wind. Together, they form a living landscape, a fluid narrative composed of light, color, architecture, and intuition. 

Credits 

Event: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival Art Program
Artists: Stephanie Lin, Isabel + Helen Studio, Uchronia, Vita Motus
Curator: Public Art Company (PAC)
Photography: Lance Gerber