Take a look at photos of the interior of Oakland’s ‘Ghost Ship’ Warehouse before last Friday’s deadly fire and you’ll find familiar motifs and objects from Bali.
Amongst the many antique pianos and other random trinkets, Hindu sculptures, Indonesian-style wooden furniture, along with Balinese parasols and poleng can be seen scattered all over the maze-like, wood-filled warehouse.
Derick Ion Almena, the man who managed the artist collective warehouse that burned down, taking 36 lives, had filled the place with Hindu art and furniture from his travels to Bali, according to the LA Times.
Almena, who apparently considered himself a “realms creator” spoke of the devastating loss on Sunday.
“They are my children. They are my friends. They are family. They are my loves. They are my future,” Almena told KGO-TV, a Bay Area news station.
The warehouse was said to be a haven for artists, a place where they could survive and come together in the quickly-gentrifying city where rents were skyrocketing.
But after the fire took so many lives, the space and the management have understandably come under heavy scrutiny for the structure’s unsafe labyrinth set-up and it apparently being full of wood with no fire sprinklers or smoke detectors, among other serious regulation-defying concerns.
