Junk in the Desert
One of the field trips done with the group of MFA students during my residency at VCUQ.
I'm writing in 2024, ten years later. The memory of those large piles of tires and sand-covered cars is still very vivid, though. There was a sense of being at an edge, as if we were near the boundary of capitalist society. Outside there was nothing, perhaps only a glimpse of the slow decay of civilisation.
One picture shows the group of students returning after the end of explorations. One of them brings a piece of car tire that they would use later during the upcycling experiments. The image and the scenario obviously makes me think of Mad Max and other post-apocalyptic movies (called "salvagepunk" by some): coming back to base with today's harvest.
The limited quality of my smartphone camera here is not as bad as in my wandering through other parts of Qatar, perhaps because of the hard desert light. Someone would later suggest that one of the photos with the tires looks like an oil painting. The partly disassembled crashed cars and parts may also be read as large sculptures indicating a stalled time. Those things won't degrade naturally anytime soon. They might as well outlive the human species in the planet.
