This project originates from a childhood memory: my last flight from Sharjah to Damascus in 2010, the year before the Syrian civil war began. Looking out of the airplane window, I saw vast circles of green and brown fields scattered across the Saudi desert. Only later did I learn these were the result of center-pivot irrigation, a mechanized system that transforms arid landscapes into patterns of cultivated land.

What struck me then, and continues to shape my practice, is how these circles operate as both utilitarian and aesthetic forms. They were never designed as art, yet from above they appear as monumental drawings in the desert. Each has its own character: size, shape, and shifting colors across the seasons. For me, they embody a tension between memory and place, between technology and landscape, between life and its inevitable exhaustion.

“50,000” retraces my flight path and translates this memory into a study of circles as carriers of meaning. The project unfolds across multiple mediums:

• An artist book gathers satellite images, text, and drawings, situating the phenomenon within technical and historical contexts.

• A series of woodblock prints, carved with CNC machinery that echoes the irrigation arm’s rotation, render the formal variations of the circles.

• Resin sculptures, pigmented according to seasonal crop cycles, embody the chromatic shifts of a single field across a year.

• An installation of vinyl-cut circles creates a spatial map equal in measurement to one irrigation field: 50,000 centimeters, or 500 meters the average diameter of a center-pivot system.

Through these translations, 50,000 reimagines cartography as both personal and emotional. What began as a fading memory of my last flight home becomes a meditation on mobility, land use, and the fragility of finite resources.