Transfix: Desert Projects

Taking Transfix into the desert, we see ghostly figures carrying suitcases as they traverse the harsh conditions of the endless landscape.  As Jean Baudrillard noted in America, the desert is a metaphor for America itself,

“The American desert is an extraordinary piece of drama [...]. It is purely, geologically dramatic, bringing together the sharpest, most ductile shapes with the gentlest, most lascivious underwater forms (1988:69). [...] The desert is a natual extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance (68). [...] American culture is heir to the deserts [...] culture as a mirage (63). For us, the whole of America is a desert" (99).

Baudrillard's postmodern desert is not an endpoint but a beginning space where a new narrative can begin. —Rachel Bowditch