“The more one looks for Saharanism, the easier it is to see that the concept has made deserts everywhere into what they are not.”

Brahim El Guabli locates “Saharanism” at work in the Sonoran Desert after a visit to The Absolute Restoration of All Things, showcased at Storefront for Art and Architecture. The piece makes legible the racializing and colonial damage of “empty” desert imaginaries, both globally and locally, by tracing the specific mechanisms of its continued erasures and infliction of wounds on the Sonoran community centered in the show. It insists that deserts are not empty.

El Guabli has also contributed to the latest publication from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC), whose title is that assertion: Deserts Are not Empty.

“Is it possible for an exhibition to fundamentally transform, upend, or even dissolve the institution that hosts it?”

Jess Myers reflects on her visits to the Palais de Tokyo’s Réclamer la terre and the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s ᐊᖏᕐᕋ­­­ᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Vers chez soi / Towards Home. In these two exhibitions centering Indigenous artists, Jess contemplates how cultural institutions encounter the limits of “representation,” but asks: "Is it possible for an exhibition to fundamentally transform, upend, or even dissolve the institution that hosts it?”

“Reset’s design proposals operate in a productive zone between the material, everyday needs of specific sites or interest groups and the freewheeling world of architectural speculation—proving that one does not need to disregard real-world constraints to let the architectural imagination run wild.”

Galen Pardee, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at GSAPP, works through questions of ambition and scale in Reset: Towards a New Commons at the Center for Architecture. Thinking with the mediating roles of design and designers between material, everyday needs and inventive imagination, Pardee finds power in small gestures: “If the turn against solutionism holds, Reset provided proof positive that leaving the architectural prestige objects of yesteryear in the dustbin does not mean abandoning drawing, craft, or visual narrative.”

“Under normal circumstances, falling in love is an intensely private experience—one that draws a person further and further into a pocket of spacetime largely unseen and unpenetrated by the outside world. On Love Island, it is a public performance.”

Asa Seresin watches Love Island and explicates the crisis of heterosexual ethics shaping the villa and its “outside.” The piece assembles a set of references from the reality television show to expose how the contradictions of hetreosexuality ride on architectural and spatial constructions: "The metaphorical island of the show’s title is halfway between paradise and laboratory, the viewers a combination of social scientist and God.”