Reveries: clay-jar towers in the desert at Desert X AlUla

Rana Haddad and Pascal Hachem’s Reveries is a site-specific installation made from stacks of earth jars in the desert landscape of AlUla. Commissioned for Desert X AlUla 2024, the work draws on the region’s traditional craft and on the shapes of the surrounding rock formations.

A wide view shows the earth-jar towers set within the desert landscape of AlUla.

A closer view brings the stacked vessels and their geometric openings into focus.

The porous tower lets the surrounding light and landscape pass through its handmade pattern.

Jars shaped by craft and erosion

The artists arranged the jars into three towers, cutting geometric openings into their surfaces by hand. The patterns recall marks made by erosion across the desert landscape, while allowing light and air to move through the structures. Shifting sunlight casts changing shadows across the jars and the ground around them.

Repeated jar forms give the installation a vertical rhythm against the open desert.

Hand-cut apertures interrupt the clay surfaces and cast changing shadows around the work.

Three towers frame the landscape

Each tower offers a different relationship with its setting. Mimicking forms a passage into the installation, where columns of jars create a threshold. Proximity, the largest tower, stands near the rocks and opens towards the sky. Framing uses a narrow slit to focus attention on a tree anchored beside a rock, placing a small detail of the landscape within the larger structure.

The tower’s cut-out pattern creates a changing screen between the viewer and the landscape.

The installation’s earthen texture sits in contrast with the broad, bare terrain.

Across the installation, the porous vessels make the surrounding terrain part of the work. Their openings shift between screen, frame and passage as visitors move around the towers.

A view through the openings connects the handmade vessels with AlUla’s rock formations.

A close perspective emphasizes the tower’s layered construction from individual vessels.

A work designed to return to earth

Reveries treats the jars as part of a continuing exchange between people and the desert. Their openings can shelter plant life and small animals as the installation changes over time. Made from earth, the structures are intended to weather and gradually return to the ground, tracing a cycle of making, use and dissolution.