Clay-jar towers frame the desert at Desert X AlUla

Rana Haddad and Pascal Hachem’s Reveries is a site-specific installation made from stacks of earth jars in the desert landscape of AlUla. Commissioned for Desert X AlUla 2024, the work draws on the region’s traditional craft and on the shapes of the surrounding rock formations.

Jars shaped by craft and erosion

The artists arranged the jars into three towers, cutting geometric openings into their surfaces by hand. The patterns recall marks made by erosion across the desert landscape, while allowing light and air to move through the structures. Shifting sunlight casts changing shadows across the jars and the ground around them.

Three towers frame the landscape

Each tower offers a different relationship with its setting. Mimicking forms a passage into the installation, where columns of jars create a threshold. Proximity, the largest tower, stands near the rocks and opens towards the sky. Framing uses a narrow slit to focus attention on a tree anchored beside a rock, placing a small detail of the landscape within the larger structure.

A work designed to return to earth

Reveries treats the jars as part of a continuing exchange between people and the desert. Their openings can shelter plant life and small animals as the installation changes over time. Made from earth, the structures are intended to weather and gradually return to the ground, tracing a cycle of making, use and dissolution.

Project Credits

Project: Reveries, 2024
Artists: Rana Haddad and Pascal Hachem
Exhibition: Desert X AlUla 2024, “In the Presence of Absence”
Curators: Maya el Khalil and Marcello Dantas
Co-artistic directors: Raneem Farsi and Neville Wakefield
Location: AlUla, Saudi Arabia
Material: earth jars
Photography: Lance Gerber / @lance.gerber