#land-art

#land-art

With Jeanne-Claude, Christo realized some of the most celebrated public installations of the past half-century, often using ordinary materials to defamiliarize treasures of human ingenuity in order to renew their meaning within the landscape. Among the structures wrapped by the couple were islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami, the Reichstag in Berlin, and of course, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. While the wrapping was the most visible aspect of their practice, the act itself exposed the invisible, tangled bureaucracies and ambitions behind the creation of vast monuments-and the real-world consequences of those efforts.

In the burn scar left by the 2022 wildfire in Sabinares del Arlanza - La Yecla Natural Park, Spain, Nomad Studio places Socarrado, a circular structure built entirely from charred juniper trunks recovered after the blaze. First conceived for the Uncommissioned Exhibition by Novo Collective, the work becomes a point of collective reflection for the communities of Santo Domingo de Silos, transforming damaged terrain into a site of memory, refuge, and healing.

Trace of Land by ELSE Design reinterprets the hay bale as a spatial installation that unfolds across the pastures of Val Badia in the Italian Dolomites. Presented as part of SMACH 2025, the international open-air art biennale, the project transforms an agricultural object into a canopy-like structure that follows the terrain, offering places for shade, rest, and gathering. The installation takes the form of a continuous path of unfurled hay bales that move with the contours of the alpine landscape.

In 1982, conceptual artist Agnes Denes transformed a barren landfill near Wall Street into a two-acre wheat field for her project *Wheatfield - A Confrontation*. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, the work involved months of labor, including soil preparation, hand-digging furrows, and planting seeds. Denes and her team maintained the field through irrigation, weeding, and fertilizing, ultimately harvesting over 1,000 pounds of wheat.