Concept
The term “Haboob” is the Arabic name for a sudden and violent sandstorm, a phenomenon that has affected the Middle Eastern region but can also be found in various parts of the world, including the Maghreb territories and the Arabian Peninsula. These storms are not only meteorological events but also powerful metaphors for how wind and sand shape and sculpt lands and cultures.
The installation aims to evoke the contrast between commercial progress and the rawness of nature by exploring these themes through a combination of video, sound, and visual materials that replicate the chaotic and unpredictable movement of sandstorms, while also reflecting the ongoing search for balance between control and surrender.
A simulator of natural phenomena, tracing changes in weather and appearances, will frame movements coordinated with light, video projections, and sound. It is a reflection on the relationship between humans, nature, and cultural exchange.
A large, light, and shimmering fabric is used, perfectly integrating with the fluid movements generated by artificial wind, giving life to a dynamic and unpredictable landscape.
Dynamic lighting and spatial sound compose a harmonious scene that mirrors the dialogue between natural time and time produced by technology. The fabric, with its constant physical transformation, maintains an element of unpredictability, ensuring that no wave ever imitates another.
This sequence of transitions and journeys of people and spices is thus represented: each movement tells the story of humanity’s relentless pursuit, and that of goods, along historical trade routes.
Spices, symbols of wealth and exchange, traveled between continents, but the sand that accompanied them on their paths represents a difficult crossing — a metaphor for the resistance and dangers that civilizations have had to face on their way toward abundance and knowledge.
Technical description
Videomapping, audio system, truss structure, fans, golden fabric.
COMMISIONED BY
Sharjah Archeological Authority, United Arab Emirates
LOCATION
Curia Julia, Roman Forum, Parco Archeologico del Colosseo
YEAR
2025
For over a decade, transmedia artists Saverio Villirillo and Gregorio Comandini have been exploring the relationships between humans and machines, producing works ranging from installations, exhibitions, and social practices. After founding NONE collective, the duo of architects and A/V artists continues their investigation into the threshold between perception, consciousness and imagination with artistic practices that induce the audience into a liminal state.
Through the language of new media, the artists aim to guide participants in their works into ecstatic states where the boundary between reality and imagination dissolves. Mental journeys are generated by overstimulated bodily senses, assuming a condition of permanent change between present and future, fiction and reality, possible and impossible.
The liminal state of altered consciousness arises from speculative narratives where the artists activate a liminal rite in which the audience takes on the central role of enchantment generator, thus constituting the fantastical substance, the magical matter that frees itself from a disenchanted world overwhelmed by a cynical realism. The duo defines a transmedial aesthetic characterized by dark environments, where light, video and sound construct cyclic patterns, sudden glimpses, suspensions and hypnotic crescendos that become disruptive energy and lead to an unexpected rupture.
Their installative and performative works resemble collective rituals where participants find themselves in a liminal state on the threshold of consciousness, identity and time, where social constraints can be temporarily dissolved and future perspectives can be questioned. The dissolution of order during liminality creates an ambiguous, fluid, and malleable situation that allows for the establishment of new customs and an individuation process.
Saverio and Gregorio’s works have been exhibited at Light Art Museum (Budapest/HU), Somerset House (London/UK), Fukuoka Science Museum (Fukuoka/JP), Farol Santander (Sao Paulo/BR), GresArt 671 (Bergamo/IT), Design week (Milan/IT), K11 Art Space (Guangzhou/CN), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome/IT).
They designed and realized historical and scientific outreach exhibitions including “Copernicus and the Revolution of the World” at the Archaeological Park of the Colosseum (2023, Rome), “Classico Pop” at the National Roman Museum (2018, Rome), the Italian Museum of Audiovisual and Cinema (2019, Rome), the Roman Museum of Santa Giulia (2023, Brescia).
