Rational Nature

2024 - 2025

The building boom that is taking place in parts of Arabia these days is unlike anything the region has seen before. When the dust settles from the earthworks all around, a fleeting moment of clarity can be glimpsed—it is the moment that nature first comes in contact with modern culture, and marks the instant that nature starts to become “organized” into some construct conceived by the logical mind. There is a violent purity to this interaction, as the natural environment becomes literally shaped into something else. In an act that foreshadows its different future, a new, rational order becomes imposed (expressed as the negative geometrical forms) and subtracted from the organic forms of the natural order.

Rational Nature is that moment of interaction as a change is starting to take shape in the state of the environment. Nowhere is it conveyed more clearly than in these desertic Arabian landscapes, where the boldness of the two diametric orders—the sinuous forms of the organic versus the geometrical forms of the rational—are expressed in landscapes reduced to just two distinct types of physical forms. What follows this depiction is unimportant here because already the suggestion all the complicated complexity of the nature/culture dynamic appears in this fleeting moment of first contact.