Art and Design Commons^™

A Lesson From Fazal Sheikh’S “Desert Bloom” For Living In A Post-Covid World, Bill Leeming

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We are told that we can expect to live with an assortment of “new normals” at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are also told that living through the COVID-19 pandemic has made us better able to face longstanding challenges such as climate change and inegalitarian social arrangements. In this paper I reflect on what we are being told by drawing on a lesson I have learned from Fazal Sheikh’s 2011 aerial photographic series to locate evidence of Bedouin villages in the Negev desert in the wake of Israeli campaigns in the 1960s to “make the desert bloom.” The …