People of Pangaea — MOATH ALOFI

People of Pangaea, 2018

In this series, aerial photographs tread the line between reality and fiction. Landscapes, desertscapes, and moonscapes offer a multiplicity of possibilities to their locality and origins. Raising questions and diffusing answers, People of Pangea present wonders in no uncertain terms.

The photographs of these anomalous formations, the oldest of which believed to be 9,000 years old, are aerial views shot over the vicinity of the holy city of Medina and its greater surrounding region. The patterns created across the land are recognized as gates, kites, or keys, identified by pilots in the early 1920s. They each occupy vast areas of land through an ordered and distinct placement of volcanic rock.

In People of Pangea, Moath questions the value of history’s past and its relationship with its present. Born and raised in Medina, the artist does not recall any mentioning of these mysterious structures, and yet, they have been noted since the 1920s. Would the knowledge of their existence have changed his understanding of the present, and would it have impacted his interpretation of the past?