This research develops an artistic practice methodology that promotes a form of spatial empathy which decentres the human body and exposes multiple temporalities existing across land. On-site and off-site practice methods open new ways of seeing and moving that act as modes of resistance to colonialism, territoriality and control.

Focused on the Southwest deserts of the United States and the military training centre at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, my research operates across the fields of land art, installation art and socio-political art. It develops a body of site-specific practice to examine how desert spaces are experienced, contrasting the open desert with military simulation sites.

I explore three research questions: (i) What does encounter through bodily immersion in the desert reveal and offer a site-specific art practice engaging with land and representations of territory? (ii) How do creative encounters with movement, mapping and spatial control inform understanding of open and closed desertscapes? (iii) Working off-site, how might creative encounters with on-site findings impact spatial relations between bodies and land? The practice-based methodology I developed to address these questions works with encounter through desert immersion, encounter through on-site creative methods (first-order desert-mapping) and encounter through off-site installations (second-order desert-mapping).

Desert immersion exposes the human body to the co-existence of multiple temporalities, which I call spatial complexity, informed by spatial theory. In contrast, simulation training in the desert imposes a frozen narrative and single fixed time, which I call spatial control, informed by spatial design and military geographies. Although there is significant literature on the history of the military in the desert during the Cold War period, there is limited analysis of the impact of current desert training on occupation and territorial ideologies.

Through encounters with desert immersion, I connect my sense of vulnerability in the desert with the notion of desert hospitality. In this ecological understanding of hospitality, the mutual vulnerability and spatial exile of bodies on land create the circumstances for sharing and thinking together – which I refer to as spatial empathy.

On-site, creative encounters involve experimental cartographic methods using site-writing, lens-based processes and intervention (first-order desert-mapping). These resist Cartesian and colonial mapping formats by refusing fixed perspectives, positions and proximity inside the military’s training sets and across open land. Depictions of desertscapes and military simulations are then blended in off-site installations (second-order desert-mapping) which use fictioning and materiality to offer new modes of resistance to the spatial control of simulation design – spatial representations which flatten space and lead to constraint and inequality. Through the creative desert-mapping methods, the on- and off-site empirical research combines to support forms of spatial complexity to challenge the colonial frameworks of spatial control (surveillance, territory and occupation).

By foregrounding the new mapping approaches as a form of disruptive empathy, and spatial complexity as radical space-time resistance, my research proposes ways of rethinking deserts (and other spaces), going beyond notions of bounded territories to frame desert encounters as opportunities for ecologically-minded change.