Abu Dhabi’s Liwa desert awaits its own last demonstration of Christo’s genius. Christo had one unfulfilled dream of constructing the World’s biggest sculpture in the UAE, a country he fell in love with in 1979.
The artist envisaged a sculpture of 150 meters high and 300 meters long using 410,000 multi-colored oil barrels in what Christo’s website describes as a “mosaic of bright sparkling colors echoing Islamic architecture, The Mastaba being an ancient and familiar shape to the people of the region”.
According to Valdimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and project director for both the Paris and Liwa initiatives, the sculpture would be ready in between five to ten years.
“My uncle used to talk about the software and hardware stages of a project,” he tells. “Software was when it was in the hearts and minds of the team, hardware was as we moved on and started physically building. So The Mastaba is still at the software point. But we have done all the engineering, we have the location and we are ready to go.”
Christo and his French wife Jeanne-Claude, an important collaborator in his work, first visited the UAE in 1979 and two years later the artist came up with the idea of The Mastaba. Then they visited the country many times. They identified a site in Gharbia, near the oasis of Liwa and approximately 160 kilometers south of Abu Dhabi city.
“Christo was a very visual artist,” his nephew says. “He found a very strong connection with the quite incredible, stunning beauty and light changes of the desert, but he also had a great relationship with the people he met in Abu Dhabi.”
The Arc de Triomphe project, first mooted by Christo in the early 1960s, has been delayed twice. France’s Bird Protection League asked for a postponement because a kestrel falcon was nesting inside the monument; “we are quite used to bird-related issues”, Yavachev says. Then, the Covid-19 pandemic forced a further delay.
Philippe Belaval, president of the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, a French government body that conserves historic buildings and manages the monument, has acclaimed the posthumous Christo project as “an event of global resonance”.
The projects doesn’t involve any public funds. The Liwa mastaba will be self-financed as the Arc de Triomphe project’s cost was met from the proceeds of sales from Christo’s work.
“The Eiffel Tower was also self-financing and cost about the same at today’s prices as will be the case with The Mastaba. Just as the Eiffel tower is a symbol of Paris and France, The Mastaba can become a symbol of Abu Dhabi.” he said.