The desert: the sublime drug of art and cinema in 2025

"New sublime" are the two words architect Jacobo García Germán uses to refer to the contemporary world's obsessive search for dramatic images, golden twilights, moving landscapes that are a little frightening but, at the same time, a promise of absolute freedom. Instagram users, advertising creatives, rock festival architects, television series scriptwriters, fashion photographers, real estate rendering designers, poets... Everyone is looking for their sublime image . "And the word 'new' appears because the novelty is that commercial language is now more urgently in need of such images," says García Germán. The interesting thing is that this addiction to the sublime leads us to the point where each dose, each sublime image, must be more intense than the previous one to once again release the hormones that stir our mood.

"And the problem is that in the city, it's no longer possible to find sublime images. At most, we can find picturesque images," says García Germán. Our parents arrived in Venice for the first time, saw the Grand Canal , and were stunned. In contrast, Venice seems to our children like a beautiful place among many others, something they'd already seen in TV shows and short videos before arriving in Italy. "But the thing is, even a landscape of forests and fjords doesn't truly touch us; that seems like bourgeois comfort. The desert is the place where the world seeks emotions."

Jacobo García Germán explains the concept of the “new sublime” to understand why culture has been filled with images of the desert poeticized to the limit: Sirat, Dune , the universe of Star Wars , the land art of the DesertX Festival, the influencers who parade at Coachella and the devotees who travel to Burning Man and the Monegros Desert Festival , Neom’s projects in Saudi Arabia, Jacquemus’ fashion shows in the salt flats... The lyrical gaze on dunes and bare rocks has always existed, but it has never been so evident. If Caspar Friedrich David painted his walker on a sea of ​​clouds in 2025, the sky would probably be clear and behind his figure a background of brownish mountains would appear.

In fact, doesn't Dune 2 replicate Friedrich Caspar David's painting in the nuclear explosion scene?

Ultimately, this fascination is natural. "I live in the middle of the desert, in a labor camp with 7,000 people," says Sergi Miquel, an engineer, designer, and urban planner employed in Neom by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. "I have a fence 100 meters from my house, and behind it is the desert. On the other side, there's another fence and the sea. It's not a desert of dunes, but a rocky one, like the one in Dune. In fact, Dune was filmed in the Jordanian desert, which is an hour and a half from here. And the fact is that I'd never had any interest in the desert before, but since I've been here, I've been dazzled. It's the light, it's the natural life that 's hard to understand at first glance and that one discovers little by little, and it's the history of the place, the history of the Bedouins adapting to this tremendous environment. I'm crazy about this world; I go out for walks many afternoons just to be in the desert." I was completely unaware of magic, but I understand that the desert is the great romantic space of our time.

Miguel Ángel López Marcos is an archaeologist who has been wandering around the deserts of the Near East longer than Miquel. Enough to develop a hint of indifference ? "You never forget the lyricism of the landscape, since the connection between place and history is intimate and continuous. For example, in Luxor, there is a dividing line that contrasts between the arable lands of the Nile, represented since Pharaonic times by the god Hapi (responsible for fertility and annual floods), with the desert represented by the god Seth ( lord of the desert, war, and chaos ). It is precisely at the edge of this desert that the graves of kings and nobles are distributed."

“The desert has always held the promise of a parallel, dreamlike world, a little unreal but recognizable. It seems to be an open door to personal liberation. John Lennon had to go to the Almería desert to remember Liverpool and school and write Strawberry Fields Forever ,” says García Germán. A few years ago, his studio designed and built Desert City on the edge of the A1, 25 kilometers from Madrid. Desert City is a vast nursery specializing in cacti that brings the evocation of oasis to a hypergeometric framework. The building has appeared in every imaginable architectural magazine and was nominated for the Mies Van der Rohe Award. And its owner has a good source of income from renting out its halls and gardens for fashion shows and events.

So, what determines whether the representation of the desert in art is valuable or banal? Fernando Navarro, screenwriter of the films Segundo Premio and Verónica and writer of the novel Crisálida , dedicated the stories in his first book, Malaventura (Impedimenta), to the rocky outcrops of Carboneras . "And right now I'm working on adapting a novel by another writer as a script. The novel doesn't take place in a desert, but we're trying to take the action there because it allows us to put the character on the edge. I think that's what makes a representation of the desert interesting: if the desert enters the character, if it presents itself to us as a mental journey, then it's worthwhile."

"That's how I always experienced the desert when my father took me to Carboneras," the writer recalls. "On the other hand, if the desert appears as a succession of photogenic postcards... then I'm less interested in it." Navarro gives cinematic examples of this mental desert: Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo , David Lynch's Dune ( "it interests me more than Villeneuve's Dune , even though it's a failed film as a narrative" ), Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas , Monte Hellman's The Shootout and Through the Hurricane ... They are all older films, shot between 1966 and 1984.

Archaeologist Miguel Ángel López Bueno also has an opinion on the sand as an aesthetic image: "I like representations of the desert in art when they convey or stir something within. You have to keep in mind that, despite being an absolutely hostile environment seemingly incompatible with life, it has been the cradle of civilizations and witness to the great discoveries of history since before the Neolithic. Thus, words like Dune (originally dunya , meaning world) or Sirat (originally path) have to do with deep-rooted concepts such as the global concept of the world in the first case, or the path one chooses in life or one's way of acting in the second case. I remember a Qurnaui saying from the inhabitants of a region of Luxor that refers to the origin of the world, which has to do with the desert itself. 'Such is life,' in Arabic ' hakatha ad-dunya ,' or ' el-dunya queda .'"

There's something else that remains to be mentioned: "Obviously, it's significant that the Persian Gulf countries are the ones that offer the greatest opportunities for getting rich quick right now," says Jacobo García Germán. "There's a new economic oil elite that feels good when the world looks at their world with aesthetic eyes."

Ramón Pigem and Carme Vilalta, Jacobo García Germán's colleagues at the RCR studio, explained this to EL MUNDO when they began constructing the Muraba Velo building in downtown Dubai. "Dubai is a place of encounter and opportunity; people come here to make a living from all over the world. But, at the same time, it's a place where there's a need to connect with a tradition, to search for something. In Dubai, you don't see any historical architecture, nothing, not a single corner . The fishing village that existed until the 1950s was very small, and great change overwhelmed it. There's no historical architecture, and that's why they look elsewhere for their memories: in the way of life of the nomads, for example, in the knowledge they had about how to make the desert heat bearable with the veils that protected their tents."

The desert can be a benign drug for the senses; the problem is using it like a consumerist amphetamine, but that can be said of any landscape. Shortly after speaking with EL MUNDO, Fernando Navarro forwarded a quote by César Aira that he came across by chance in a novel: " There is almost no possibility of being surprised, because surprise has always already receded into the immediate past, and only repetition remains ."