Breath of the Desert: How Art Combined the Red Sea and Infinity

From a bird’s eye view, it is a massive, winding structure composed of dotted depressions and meticulous planning. For those on land, it is a series of large, conical dunes and aimless pits. For Greek artist Danae Stratou, industrial designer Alexandra Stratou and architect Stella Constantinides (the DAST. Arteam), it’s a “exploration of infinity.”

Desert Breath is a land art installation of striking proportions located near the Red Sea by El-Gouna, Egypt. Incredibly huge, it was carved out of the Sahara like a nod to its purpose: an infinite spiral set in a seemingly endless natural wonder – Africa’s largest desert.

It was rooted in the team’s desire to work with a medium as mystical and misunderstood as the desert. “In our mind, the desert was a place to experience infinity. We approached the desert as a state of mind, a landscape of the mind. The starting point was the conical shape, the natural formation of sand as a material.

Spanning nearly one million square feet (100,000 square meters), Desert Breath is a statement it required an equally immense amount of work. The play saw the removal of 280,000 square feet (8,000 square meters) of sand and the installation of a large central man-made oasis. Located between the sea and the body of the mountains, it wants to be a meeting place between “the immensity of the sea and the immensity of the desert”.

Seen from above, the room is a maze of 89 cones and 89 depressions this spirals outward from each other into “two geometrically precise arms whose diameter increases as they move away from the central axis”. The precision and mathematical finesse on display sets it apart from organic environments, but does not forgo the wonder they bring in tandem with the vastness of the Sahara.

Desert Breath seen completion in 1997 after several years of construction under the watchful eye of three Greek women devoted to their vision: DAST. Although made to describe infinity, Desert Breath been built be finite: the structure is destined to erode and disappear into the landscape from which it was created. About a decade and a half after its installation, the piece was destined to disappear.

Although it no longer has the size it had when it was first built, Desert Breath remains a modern monument that combines today’s knowledge with age-old curiosity swept away by time.

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