The desert in western thought is a place for intellectual exercise. The habit used to be that desertscapes attracted expeditioners and colonizers as a place to exercise their free-will, and perhaps challenge life itself. As the desert enters philosophy, Nietzsche's metaphors of loss and salvation attached to the desert, and Deleuze and Guattari's placement of deterrioralization, the desert i sublimated into the imagination as a holder of nothingness yet establishes itself as a place for myth and regeneration at the edge of civilization.
In Norgren's images, the desert is a transmuted landscape, appropriated from icy landscapes and forced into an oversaturated desert, contending the common myth of an imaginary idea of a nothingness devoid of color. Combined with Tarek's sound; a fake singing dune mechanically incorporated in a steel plate that mimics a sound phenomenon in the desert known as "the singing dune" when exposed to calculated vibrations, further distorting that imaginary desert.
This double reappropriation questions common notions of nothingness, how imagined landscapes are constructed and experienced, and how transformative experiences occur and whether or not their contingency can be collectively demonstrated.
Documentation from the group show SYNC, curated by Emily Pretzsch and Mara Aiko, Marienstraße 10 Berlin, November - December 2024.
