14-03-2025
Desert X 2025: Robot adobes and a G.H.O.S.T. Ride
Sandra Hale SchulmanSpecial to ICTDESERT HOT SPRINGS, Calif. — A robotic arm pulses mud into walls. A nomadic caravan carries messages for Indigenous site-specific, international art exhibition Desert X that lands in the Coachella Valley every two years opened March 8 and runs through May 11, bringing large scale art from a global pool with two Native artists in the desert OasisRonald Rael, Indo-Hispano, who calls himself more of an architect than an artist despite being shown in numerous museums, has created Adobe Oasis which champions the revival and reimagining of traditional earthen building techniques that uses contemporary sustainable and innovative housing solutions for the immediate future amid the climate crisis, these adobe mud structures may have saved buildings — and lives — in the recent Los Angeles a unique 3D printing process, he has created structures entirely from mud. Rael's corrugated earthen ribbons are programmed to mimic the texture of palm trees, inspired by the Coachella Valley's palm oases, which thrive on the large aquifer of desert waters for millennia. The passageways frame views of the land and sky, centered around a palm court.
'One of the primary materials in my practice is adobe which is mud mixed with straw and building material,' Rael told ICT from the installation site. 'I have a long experience with it, it's part of my heritage practice for generations. My father, my grandparents and my great- grandparents all were people who built buildings made out of mud and I continue that tradition, But I do it using innovative manufacturing technology and robotics. I'm building an installation where the robot applies the mud and relies on the sun of the Palm Springs desert to dry the material, and it turns rock hard once it's dry.'The machine is a six-axis robot and entirely powered by solar, which Rael says makes it 'much more organic but also futuristic.' Rael pumps the mud and 'the robot is putting it in place like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube and building it up through that way, but really big.' The mud is supplied from a company in Riverside, California. Rael said he would've worked with a local company but he needed a large quantity and needed to move quickly.
Rael designed the 60-feet by 20-feet structure and acts as construction manager on site.'I wanted to take advantage of the site, so the entire structure encapsulates one of the palm trees that were already growing on the site and so creates a courtyard with this tree,' he said. 'I wanted to capture the sun in the center. The texture of the mud emulates the bark of the palm tree, so it has these woven ribbons. There's a series of large rooms and small rooms, places to sit, places to lay down that frame the sun. There's a staircase that brings you up above so you can look down. You can connect to the site in a number of different ways, connect to the land it actually points to the setting sun on the San Jacinto Mountain.'Rael also filmed the 3D mud printer robot in action.'Experiencing this, actually seeing the robot at work is mesmerizing, to see the mud being placed and extruded out,' he said. 'But it's a really demanding process, it's a machine like a forklift is a machine.'He says that the Adobe Oasis doesn't emulate anything. He describes it as a process piece and it's 'part of a long-term practice of understanding how to make things.'As for what he calls himself: he doesn't know how to categorize himself. 'I'm not an artist,' he said. 'I'm not a sculptor, although a lot of my experiments are perceived to look like art, but really this one is studying the way the robot moves, the way the material behaves, the kind of forms and sizes and dimensions that one could make with it. Technically I'm an architect.' He's not trained as an architect but is working on the border of art and architecture. 'I would say it's on its way to learning how to make architecture and when you think about what architecture is comprised of, it's very fundamental. It's forms, their spaces, and there's ordering systems, it's kind of a proto architecture,' Rael said, who is head of the art department at the University of California in Berkeley.G.H.O.S.T. RideCannupa Hanska Luger, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota, has created a nomadic caravan called G.H.O.S.T. (Generative Habitation Operating System Technology) Ride, that uses speculative fiction to envision sustainable, land-based futures. The ride expands on Luger's Future Ancestral Technologies series where Indigenous communities live in sync with land and industrial detritus, ceramics and artist-made objects along with new video and sound work, this time-jumper caravan has water and light gathering technologies dreamed from Luger's speculative fiction ethos.'The project that I'm presenting for Desert X is a mobile installation,' Luger said. 'I considered that after taking into consideration the environmental impacts of works on desert landscapes. I was like it moves. We can alter the impact on any set site. We're going to do three moves throughout the 10 weeks that it exists out there.'
'It's a vehicle. It's a van. It's literally my van,' Luger said. 'I've done all kinds of alterations and conversions to it over a period of time and exhibited it as an art object. This will be the first time that it'll be exhibited as an art object in an environment. Other times it had been inhabiting museum spaces. This iteration, it will be under its own power.'The surface of the 1988 Volkswagen Syncro, similar to a four-wheel drive Vannegan, is covered with mirrored vinyl and Luger created a fog drop to gather moisture out of the air. The mirror vinyl is similar to what Luger used on his Mirror Shields that he designed and were used at Standing Rock where protesters held the shields up to reflect back at the police and also up to the sky to make a moving river as they walked. They ended up in museums, a move Luger was conflicted about as he felt they were protest signs, not material is similar but the material on the van is automotive-grade mirror vinyl, like a wrap, he said. 'Within the timeline that I had, polishing the whole vehicle to a mirror polish was not feasible, so if I use the mirrored vinyl, there is a nod to the Mirror Shield project, or at least an aesthetic that inhabits my practice,' Luger said. 'This van mirrors the landscape and everything reflected in it. It allows the audience to project themselves literally onto the vehicle, with the opportunity and generosity to imagine yourself in this nomadic future.'
Luger wants people to experience 'what it means to be an extension of the land rather than a dominion model over possession is the kind of transformation that I'm interested in.''I've seen this myth and idea of ownership and possession and yet I've also experienced in my life the nomadic aspect of North Americans across the board,' he said. 'We move within the boundaries of our nation but don't realize that the boundaries of our nations are huge and that you are to this day a nomadic people.'The van pulls two trailers. 'The front of the van is a tipi tilted forward and open, so it has this conical surface over the front, made out of a mesh material that is used in construction. This is a way to consider how do you purpose these materials when the technology is deemed obsolete?''Like the technology of building city after city, what happens when we acknowledge and recognize that we are a part of the land and that there is no possession model and all of the industries that we've developed up until this point, what happens to all of their by-product?' he said. 'This is a way to create a water harvesting system out of a by-product of architectural development.'The first location of G.H.O.S.T. Ride is in the most remote spot in a hilly area of Desert Hot Springs, a desert valley where fierce winds and smoke blow through.
This will be the first spot they will showcase it and it'll be moved. Luger said he presents this as an artist and that it is the future. 'What I'm really interested in is our population remembering that we are embedded in belief, that we can imagine alternatives to the systems that we are struggling with presently, the systems that are failing us presently,' he said. He continued: 'How do we dream and imagine alternatives to the systems that we live in presently, especially when you're looking at things like weather events, environmental shifts, fire as a season rather than a phenomenon? How do we grapple with the impact of our present systems not having a sustainable future? Can we imagine alternatives to it? I encourage people to do just that.'Desert X 2025 runs until May 11, 2025. For more information visit was curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-Curator Kaitlin full list of participating artists:
Sanford Biggers, b. 1970, Los Angeles; based in New York City
Jose Dávila, b. 1974, Guadalajara; based in Guadalajara
Agnes Denes, b. 1931, Budapest; based in New York City
Cannupa Hanska Luger, b. 1979, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota, Standing Rock Reservation, ND; based in Glorieta, New Mexico
Raphael Hefti, b. 1978, Neuchâtel; based in Zurich
Kimsooja, b. 1957, Daegu; based in Seoul and Paris
Kapwani Kiwanga, b. 1978, Hamilton; based in Paris
Sarah Meyohas, b. 1991, New York City; based in New York City
Ronald Rael, b. 1971, Conejos Country, Colorado; based in Berkeley, California
Alison Saar, b. 1956, Los Angeles; based in Los Angeles
Muhannad Shono, b. 1977, Riyadh; based in Riyadh
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