Presented first in Algeciras, Spain, on Black Friday 2024, ATACAMA FASHION transformed public space into a temporary field of visibility. It did not illustrate a problem from the outside, but placed the viewer inside a material contradiction: between beauty and exhaustion, attraction and responsibility, spectacle and residue.
In parallel with its presence in public space, ATACAMA FASHION was presented as an immersive installation at Boxes Alcultura in Algeciras. Inside the exhibition space, the project shifted from an urban intervention into a concentrated sensory environment. Light, water, sound and video created a dense spatial experience in which the mechanisms of fast fashion were no longer perceived as distant statistics, but as an atmosphere: seductive, artificial and unsettling. The installation invited visitors to enter a landscape of consumption, where beauty and excess appeared inseparable from exhaustion, waste and ecological loss.
In 2025, ATACAMA FASHION was shown at Künstlerhaus Wien in Vienna, extending the project into a new institutional and urban context. Presented within one of Austria’s important art spaces, the work entered into dialogue with questions of visibility, responsibility and the role of art in addressing global ecological systems. The Vienna presentation emphasised the project’s ability to move between public space, exhibition architecture and social discourse — transforming environmental data into a spatial, luminous and affective experience.
ATACAMA FASHION is an artistic intervention by ROMB Verein that confronts the hidden ecological violence of the global fashion industry. The project takes the Atacama Desert in Chile — one of the driest places on Earth and today also one of the symbolic landscapes of textile waste — as a starting point for a broader reflection on consumption, water, excess and disappearance. The installation consists of illuminated water tanks arranged as sculptural objects in public space. Their coloured light refers to the visual language of fashion, advertising and desire, while the water inside them recalls the enormous amount of natural resources consumed in the production of clothing. What appears seductive from a distance becomes, on closer inspection, a system of accumulation: water, colour, plastic, waste, image.
Artists: k.ada / Javier Viana
The project asks what remains after the promise of endless choice. Behind every garment there is a geography: rivers, deserts, labour, transport, chemicals, bodies and discarded matter. ATACAMA FASHION makes this invisible geography visible — not through moral instruction, but through light, scale and spatial experience. In 2025, the project became one of the central works of ROMB’s annual programme FREIHEIT? NEIN! DANKE!, expanding its investigation into the relationship between freedom, consumption and ecological dependency.