Desert Breath: an impressive land installation in the Egyptian desert

Desert Breath, located in the Egyptian desert, is a land art project created by D.A.ST. Arteam to show the passage of time through its gradual erosion. The project was completed in 1997 and is still viewable today through satellite images. Learn more in the article that follows!

The double-spiral site-specific work covers an area of 100,000m² in the eastern Sahara desert bordering the Red Sea in El Gouna, Egypt. It consists of positive and negative conical sand volumes, positioned in two interlocking logarithmic spirals. The spirals follow the same direction of rotation, from a common point of departure and have a phase difference of 180 degrees. Each cone of the spiral is scaled according to its distance from the central W-shaped section, which is 30meters in diameter and was initially filled with water, which now has evaporated. The construction of the project required the displacement of 8,000m³ of sand and took 9 months to complete.

According to D. Stratou, member of the D.A.ST. team, the 15-meter diameter outside cones have double the height of a human being and as the visitor walks towards the center, the cones' size gradually diminishes to the size of objects. This shift in scale gives the visitor the sense of growing larger while approaching the center and helps realize the human scale and that of the desert. The work exists up to htis day, nearly 20 years after its construction, "becoming through its slow disintegration, an instrument to measure the passage of time".

For more pictures and a video wih the construction process please click here!