White Desert is a speculative landscape, suspended in time and space. The installation draws on the motif of the garden as a site of imagination, resistance, and transformation. Within the white desert, under near-laboratory conditions, we witness the emergence of a new ecosystem. The organisms that inhabit it hover on the threshold between plant life, animality, and abstraction. These nascent life forms await classification, while everything is coated in a strange, toxic dust.
The work is inspired by Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness — Prospect Cottage. Created on a barren, stony shoreline beneath a nuclear power station, the site stands as a raw and poetic landscape, shaped in defiance of environmental conditions and the logic of survival. On a narrative level, the installation also references the literary worlds of Italo Calvino, where space and time fracture, and matter takes on the qualities of dream, memory, and metaphor. White Desert is a place in which imagination operates as a form of survival.