The 5th edition of Desert X –led by creative director Neville Wakefield and co-curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maesas– affirms the desert as a complex place, moving away from the idea of its use as a mere stage or blank canvas. This edition reaffirms the role of the desert not only as a geographical space, but as a territory laden with cultural, historical, and political meanings

Adobe walls embroidered by a 3D printing machine generate passageways and walls that frame our view of the earth and sky. At the center of the building stands a palm tree, a symbol of the city that hosts Desert X every two years. Adobe Oasis is the work of artist and architect Ronald Rael, who, inspired by ancient building practices, stands as “a powerful alternative” to modern architecture.

In the Palm Springs Desert, artists encounter a segmented landscape where human presence is unavoidable and nature is never vast and unencompassable. The development of real estate investments and luxury hotels coexist with the residential complexes that extend throughout the valley. Power lines and their towers are omnipresent in the landscape, and highways line the horizon wherever you look. 

The 5th edition of Desert X –led by creative director Neville Wakefield and co-curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maesas– affirms the desert as a complex place, moving away from the idea of its use as a mere stage or blank canvas. This edition reaffirms the role of the desert not only as a geographical space, but as a territory laden with cultural, historical, and political meanings. Rather than treating it as a mere backdrop or empty canvas, this edition is committed to exploring and respecting its intrinsic complexity. Thus, Desert X 2025 challenges traditional representations of desert space as uninhabited and inhospitable.

The artists in Desert X confront a desert that is wounded, mutilated and segmented by human influence and urban development, engaging in a dialogue with the landscape in diverse ways. While some works choose to make themselves present in the landscape, such as Sarah Meyohas's, who erects an undulating structure in the desert to immediately invade our view; others, such as Muhannad Shono's, blend into the desert.

What Remains is the title of Shono’s work, a series of canvases that function as translucent mounds against the barren surroundings. The remnants are incorporated into the dunes, which, due to the wind, undulate their shapes and become covered with sand. The work manages to synchronize so much with the desert that it makes us look up at the horizon line crossed by a highway. Behind it, a freight train passes at full speed.

Raphael Hefti's work deals with the literal meaning of the line and, as if it were another horizon. It raises a suspended band over the desert. Using resistant yet reflective materials, the artist creates a new, artificial horizon that sometimes emerges as a disconcerting element, and sometimes as a mimetic element in the landscape. This perceptual ambivalence is similar to the rest of the lines that coexist with the work in the desert landscape: oscillating horizons that affirm or deny their presence, depending on how perceptive we are to them.

The lines also make themselves present in the work of Jose Davila. The act of being together is a sculptural space generated from immense rocks stacked on top of each other. Rocks that, as the artist themselves explain, “seem to have appeared as if they came from nowhere” but which, however, are immigrant rocks. Brought from Mexico, these evoke the longest line that crosses the desert: the border wall that, crossing it from east to west, mutilates it in half. 

The desert is not a blank canvas; it is crisscrossed by lines, some of which are part of infrastructures that support communications, transport goods, or provide electricity to cities; others organize and separate bodies, limit free movement, and establish who has the right to life.

Like the most poetic of oases, Agnes Denes's The Living Pyramid raises a pyramidal structure that she fills with plants so that they grow over the weeks. Denes, a pioneer of ecological art, transforms the act of planting into a symbolic and political exercise, inviting us to imagine a future where life can flourish even in the most inhospitable environments.

In line with this vision, the current edition of Desert X encourages us to rethink the desert not as an empty or desolate space, but as a territory full of possibilities, memory and dignity. Just as Denes makes life flourish, this edition of Desert X leaves us imagining what a desert would look like in the future. A desert that honors its indigenous peoples and never forgets those who lost their lives trying to cross it.