A fetish?! …an inanimate object with supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit
I have been living the last ten years in a landscape rich with water, rich with soil and rich with plants, the Berner Oberland in Switzerland. Each day this Berner Oberland landscape inspires me. I am happy in and enthused by this Swiss Alp landscape.
But yesterday, I came across an old folder of images that stunned me. Stunned? Yes, because as I went through all 50 of them, they gradually inserted themselves. Internally, I could not understand how the barren emptiness of the Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter, could elicit such a strange, such a pulsating attraction.
It was just memories, right? Yeah, ten years ago, I lived and worked there for more than a year as the installation manager for the landscape at this resort destination–that had its own memories–but the desert–the Empty Quarter has its own magnetism.
I feel it; but I don’t understand it.
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- Life is rare. Water is rare.
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- Water inside the shelter.
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- Something imposes itself upon the seductive dunes.
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- Shadows on the Tropic of Cancer.
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- Every once in a while.
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- And then there was rain.
Credits to the client TDIC, the architecture team of Dubarch/Northpoint, the interior design by Hirsch, Bedner Associates and the landscape architecture team LMS International.
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Comments on the images:
- Something fundamental, basic. Where there is water, there is life. Where there is no water, there is no life.
- After water, this Empty Quarter requires protection for safety of life.
- The sand dunes are the seductive face of the Empty Quarter.
- Why do you think the Bedouins call it Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter?
Have the sands actually taken hold of you?
I would love to see that place sometime – but I feel I must rush because it “feels” like those sand dunes will soon bury it.