Desert Things \ Statement

This work turns toward the desert as a site where origin stories — my origin story — are articulated and undone. I am interested in the desire for — and impossibility of — locating a single, coherent origin, and in the ways myths of origin are continually fabricated. These myths can function as medicine, offering context and belonging, but also as weapons, used to justify power and exclusion. My project seeks to open this tension, to allow the origin story to be re-accessed, re-arranged, and held in its fictive and ephemeral nature. It is also an attempt to trace back land practices in the desert context — practices of relation, survival, ritual, and imagination — before the longing for rootedness is coupled with notions of ownership over land.

The desert in Jewish history is not an end-point but a space of transition, pre-formation, and dissolution. It is the in-between: before arrival to “the promised land,” before rootedness, where sin, sacrifice, and purification intertwine. In this terrain the Israelites worshiped the golden calf (in their yearning for the concrete, when lacking a clear image; it is a desire to stabilize meaning); sent scapegoats into the mountains, and encountered revelation. It is the space of emptiness, where God speaks. The desert thus becomes a paradoxical spatio-temporal field for origin — unstable, non-linear, provisional — but also its own entity, unyielding to the whims of humans. Within the framework of contemporary terms such as “indigenous” and “colonized,” the attempt to locate an original relation of Jewish people to land is itself often entangled in colonial logic. Yet the desert, in its refusal of permanence, offers a paradigm shift in which return to an origin is less about purity than about the ongoing capacity to shift, falter, re-form, and reimagine.

My use of relief, as a form, reinforces this thinking. Across empires and marginalized cultures alike, reliefs carried narrative and myth. But time, erosion, and entropy soften their authority. Ruins and residues open themselves to new readings, becoming liminal spaces that invite imagination. Sand itself, as material, embodies this fragility: loose, evasive, entropic, refusing permanence, echoing the impossibility of holding onto a single truth.

In this work I envision the desert as a shared terrain — perhaps we are still in it. It is a place of cohabitation with demons, discarded figures, and otherness. Rather than seek closure, the reliefs invite plurality, provisionality, and the coexistence of different narratives. Origin here is always unsettled: a space of articulation and disintegration, where myth can be reclaimed and re-fictionalized.

I like to think of entropy, like the desert, as a space and process of transition, transformation, and reformation — the in-between of order and nothingness, a terrain of potential. Conceptual and material, it appears in the shifting and disintegration of sand, in the erosion of narrative, myth, and origin stories. Entropy is not mere decay, but at times a creative force and necessity. It opens spaces within rigid structures for imagination, agency, and re-articulation. Like the desert, it is a liminal field where forms dissolve and recombine, where meaning falters only to allow new possibilities to emerge. Entropy makes room for multiplicity, for provisionality, for re-imagining — a condition of continual transformation and co-existence.