Interactive Light Installation · Zabeel Park, Dubai Frame
Framing Nature is a site-specific interactive light installation located in Zabeel Park, conceived in direct dialogue with the Dubai Frame, positioned at the intersection of art, technology, and ecology.
While the Dubai Frame monumentalizes the urban by framing the city’s skyline, Framing Nature applies the same urban operation to ecology.
Framing Nature does not alter the landscape as much as it reorders attention, using framing as a tool to monumentalize the everyday and draw attention to what is usually overlooked. Nature.
It consists of three large-scale frames positioned around existing trees in Zabeel Park, which, through scale, proportion, and light, isolates and objectifies trees as individual subjects, objects of attention rather than background landscape.
The work uses comparative framing as a tool, in contrast with the Dubai frame, a large, iconic, golden, singular object that frames the skyline of the built environment. While sharing the golden ratio proportions as a reference to the Dubai Frame, the frames in Framing Nature are intimate, plural, integrated within the landscape, made of oxidised steel, and monumentalize the mundane nature.
A continuous illuminated rim defines each frame, while embedded sensors translate capacitance in trees into subtle variations of light and sound.
Artist: Firas Safieddine and Cristian Rizzuti
Commissioned by Dubai Culture & Arts Authority
