So far, in Shifting Grounds, we challenged ourselves as cultural practitioners and as a collective to tackle research, communication and event management with sustainable approaches. In to shift, the collective approached the theme as artists, creating a link between the event building we have experimented with, and the art practice rhetoric we have been proposing.

The objective was to take it a step further and explore ways of artistically interacting with ecology. Through a series of site-specific interventions, we explored locations that contained signs of human intrusion in what should have naturally been a bare environment. As artists, we faced the following questions: How can artists explore their relationship with their natural surroundings? What is considered to be natural in the first place? How does one experience art without creating an adverse lasting impact on a given environment?

What better place to explore these concepts than in Wadi Rum, a vast expanse of desert with its own set of values, unfortunately, diverted and transformed to achieve economic gain. When looking at it from a cultural perspective, one can’t help but consider cultural or artistic projects based in neighbouring deserts, such as Al Ula in Saudi Arabia, or Forever is Now in Egypt. These tend to use the desert as an instagrammable backdrop rather than create a thought-provoking interaction with its specific features. While these attract attention to the region, they do so in invasive manners. 

Furthermore, in the Jordanian desert areas, there are many intrusive signs of urban intervention by the local communities, where they have adopted building and living approaches borrowed from the city. These practices inevitably transform the desert and its environment. Our interventions investigated the migration of urban objects foreign to the desert, interacted with different found structures and locations, and raised even more questions:

to ground?
to highlight what is foreign to an environment, using an invasive body to pinpoint the existence of another one?

to replace?
to accept the existence of an alien object to the point where one tries to integrate it into the landscape? 

to reiterate?
to turn a blind eye on a human intervention, trying to delete its impact?

to inhabit?
to reimagine an alternate reality where the invasive structures bear a purpose?

to shift?
to fuse fictitious and actual narratives – which one leads the other?