Coachella’s hippo artwork
Coachella Weekend 1 featured an artwork called 'Network Operations' that stages a surreal scene of hippos running a media conglomerate, blending large‑scale sculpture with festival satire. (desertsun.com)
A 60-foot hippo office tower became one of Coachella Weekend 1’s most visible attractions, with performers in masks acting out a collapsing media empire on the festival grounds. (kesq.com) The installation is called “Network Operations,” and it sat between the Coachella Stage and the Outdoor Theatre during the April 10-12 weekend at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. Desert Sun described it as a three-story command center where hippos in suits wreck their own workplace as fans watch from below. (desertsun.com) The piece was built by the installation art group Dedo Vabo, whose hippo characters have appeared at Coachella before. The Los Angeles Times reported the troupe returned to the festival field for the first time since 2019 after earlier storylines about power companies, the space race and the stock market. (aol.com) This year’s version shifts the joke to broadcasting, newspapers, podcasts and telecom-style control rooms. Derek Doublin of Dedo Vabo told the Los Angeles Times the hippos reflect society with “dark, absurdist humor” and represent institutions with “enormous power” but little sense of where they are going. (aol.com) Coachella has long treated large-scale art as part of the main event, not a side attraction. The festival’s art program says it commissions new landmark-scale works each year to transform the Empire Polo Field into public space as well as a concert site. (coachella.com) That program now runs in collaboration with Public Art Company, whose founder Raffi Lehrer says he has led Coachella’s curatorial work with art director Paul Clemente for about a decade. Public Art Company says those commissions have reached audiences of more than 125,000 people and helped place permanent works across the Coachella Valley. (publicartcompany.com) “Network Operations” arrived during Coachella’s 25th edition, which ran April 10-12 for Weekend 1 and returns April 17-19 for Weekend 2. The official festival site lists those dates, and the hippo tower joined other 2026 installations by Sabine Marcelis, Kyriakos Chatziparaskevas and The Los Angeles Design Group. (coachella.com; dezeen.com) By Sunday, the joke was still the same one visible from the grass below: a glass-walled headquarters full of hippos, pressing buttons and losing control in public. (desertsun.com)
