The term “desert” evokes a simplified image of hostile climates and barren landscapes, where life seems impossible.
However, this view overlooks the complex intersections between nature, history, and power that define these territories. Far from being empty, deserts are spaces deeply shaped by human intervention—from resource extraction to militarization and occupation. This instrumentalization turns them into technologized landscapes, where anthropogenic alterations leave both ecological and cultural traces.
Basamortua is a small critical photography exhibition, accompanied by a lecture, that explores the notion of the desert as both a real and projected space—where modern utopias simultaneously take shape and dissolve. Through images of technologized landscapes in nearby and familiar contexts, the project investigates how the desert has been occupied as a stage for the “castles in the air” of progress: energy, technological, and territorial promises that frequently end as early ruins.
In dialogue with the Biennial's theme, the exhibition questions the utopian aspirations inscribed in these landscapes: What happens when dreams of expansion, control, and salvation are projected onto territories perceived as void? The lecture will expand this critical reading, offering a reflection on the boundaries between utopia, technology, and ecology in the contemporary construction of the desert.
Basamortua ties directly to the theme “Castles in the Air” by questioning the utopias projected onto territories perceived as empty. The exhibition reflects on how deserts have been imagined as available spaces for the promises of progress: energy, technological, or extractive infrastructures that claim to bring development, but often disrupt local life and generate difficult-to-reverse externalities.
Through black-and-white photography and critical cartographies, the project contrasts exhausted, technologized landscapes with unoccupied natural ones, revealing the tension between projection and abandonment, dream and ruin—inviting us to rethink the boundaries of contemporary utopia.