Among the thorns of the desert.
Our eyes full of dust

The sun burns in the distant sky, on the grainy sand, in the exiled soul. The desert translates into an alchemical vessel, a space that has transformative powers in which sand can turn into gold, life into eternity, soul into God. A place in which both possibilities and impossibilities become multiple realities, in which the artists exhibited propose to us a panorama for reflection and contemplation on essential questions regarding margins and centers, fertility and destruction, alteration and accommodation to a new possible way of being in the world.

The exhibition intends to invite the viewers to a revision of our usual ways of thinking about margins and center, civilization and wasteland, about the loss of an old way of life. For those who live outside the borders of the desert or in a big city, desert represents a location marked by fear, loss, exile and emptiness – the result of destruction and decay. But those who truly live within the desert, however, embrace this arid environment and see roses in the thorns of the desert. The title of the exhibition is inspired by a poem written by the great Palestinian poet Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.

The artworks exhibited convey the idea of a spiritual exile – being “alone” means more than being physically alone, means a separation from all signs of life, a trope for the failure of fulfilment, of human alienation and isolation in the big cities. In contrast, we can think of Bedouin life and their culture which is spiritual, communal and ecological. They are actively engaged with the world, rather than in opposition with it.

Wandering through the evocative display of the exhibition, becomes an act of connectedness, the desert serves as both an interior and exterior landscape in which the aestethics of extinction is produced by the human as the supreme force of nature. In this otherness, the imagination is blossoming. The eyes are full of dust (politics, sistemic influences, capitalism etc), so we must make a “retour” to the interior eye, in order to adapt ourselves to the new possibilities that are as many as there are grains of sand in the desert.