After Filwa Nazer’s installation at Desert X AlUla, Saudi Arabia, 2024.
Desert X’s official description and four photographs establish a serpentine structure made from overlapping triangular black steel meshes. The text explicitly describes a narrow visitor path that rises toward the head and an outward view of desert and mountains. The photographs show an S-shaped plan, an open grated walkway, side rails, ground-supported triangular fins and a railed elevated endpoint. This supports entering at the low end, walking to the head and returning by the same route; the model does not invent an exit or stairs at the elevated end.
No dimensioned plan or engineering schedule was found in the supplied documentation. Human figures and handrails in the official photographs are the scale anchors. The model uses a 28 m longitudinal span, a roughly 1.44 m-wide deck, a 2.75 m-high endpoint and fins approximately 3.7–4.7 m tall. Those are explicit visual estimates, not verified dimensions. There are 21 paired fin stations, with simplified mesh gauges, connections and foundation plates.
The route is continuously graded and the camera remains at a 1.65 m eye height above it. Handrail and fin collisions prevent leaving the elevated deck sideways. The exterior sand remains navigable within the scene boundary. The endpoint is a lookout, not a through route.
The official photographs locate the work among tall, layered sandstone outcrops on a pale sandy floor. The model includes a close canyon wall, distant rock masses, erosion strata, scattered stones, sparse dry vegetation, granular sand and open sky. These are procedural interpretations, not a terrain survey or a geographically exact skyline. Time-of-day controls illustrate how sunlight changes the steel silhouette, mesh shadows and canyon colours; night is not a claim about festival lighting or opening hours.
The supplied AlUla Moments festival guided-tour film is a 63-second contextual montage. Browser playback was inspected, including samples around 0:13, 0:18 and 0:28; these did not establish a complete installation-specific visitor route. No reliable Preserving Shadows sequence was timestamped, so the reconstruction is grounded primarily in the four official photographs and accompanying description, not claimed as a complete video reconstruction.
Reference photographs are by Lance Gerber, as identified in the official image filenames. They were inspected for research only. No source photos, video frames, audio or other reference media are distributed here. Geometry, procedural materials and the catalogue thumbnail are original project-generated assets. This independent interpretation is not an official digital twin.