The Ministry of Culture of Saudi Arabia announces the country’s inaugural participation at the Triennale Milano with a pavilion dedicated to Al Ahsa, an agricultural oasis that has been home to diverse civilizations since the third millennium BCE. Titled Maghras: A Farm for Experimentation, the exhibition in Milan explores the ways in which farming traditions, ecologies, and cultural memory are being reshaped in an agricultural landscape that has a long history and that is currently undergoing rapid transformation.
The exhibition is the culmination of research, programs, and artistic interventions at Maghras, a farm and interdisciplinary community space in Al Ahsa, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. In the months preceding the exhibition, artists, architects, and researchers engaged in a dialogue with inhabitants of local farming communities, bringing together first-hand reflections on the oasis and the region. Through performances, film screenings, and workshops, the research leading up to the presentation in Milan explored connections between culture and agriculture. The exhibition takes the form of a maghras, a traditional unit of measure that describes the land delineated by four palm trees.
The pavilion will bring visitors into the beating heart of Al Ahsa’s contemporary communities and ancient cultures. Videos, sound installations, and research are accompanied by participatory programs that ask questions about preservation, adaptation, and reimagination to revive bonds between people and ecology.
Urbanization and technological advancement are at the forefront of changes taking place in Saudi Arabia, and they often draw focus away from the quieter but no less significant transformations in rural regions. Al Ahsa, long central to the nation’s agricultural heritage, faces global challenges impacting rural regions and farming communities including changing demographics, environmental pressures, monocrop farming, urban sprawl, desertification, and shifts in communal life.
The Saudi pavilion in Milan examines the transformation of the landscape of Al Ahsa through a dialogue between art, research, and local memory, emphasizing the need for collective reflection on the future of local communities. Contributors use the exhibition space to reflect on the depletion of Al Ahsa’s springs and aquifers, the process of industrialization, and the historical shift from a diverse to a more homogeneous range of crops, dominated in particular by the date palm.
Special thanks to Abdulmonem Alrashed Humanitarian Foundation for their generous support and for hosting Maghras at the foundation’s farm for 8 months.
