Lisa Batacchi's Land Art Mongolia Biennale project blends Miao indigo dyeing with nomadic symbolism

For the fourth edition of the Land Art Mongolia Biennale, titled "Catching the Axis – in between the sky and the earth," artist Lisa Batacchi (born 1980, Florence, US/IT) created a site-specific installation and performance. Her journey began with the I-Ching hexagram 2, which inspired a search for a precise blue hue representing sky and purity. She traveled to Ordos, Inner Mongolia, a ghost city built 15 years ago in the desert, where the ORDOS 100 project commissioned 100 artists and architects. There, the horse symbol struck her as nationalist propaganda. She then visited Hohhot, where the Chinese government forced nomadic Mongols into sedentary housing in the 1950s, and finally the Guizhou region, home to the Miao tribe known for indigo batik. Collaborating with Miao women, Batacchi dyed a 490 cm x 320 cm tent in multiple blue shades, featuring a hybrid male horse with cow udders—her astral animal. The tent was supported by a 520 cm x 270 cm x 200 cm wooden structure built in Ulaanbaatar. After a 26-hour train ride on the Trans-Mongolian Railway and an 18-hour bus journey, she arrived in Dariganga, Gobi Desert. At the sacred Altan Ovoo mountain, she performed a procession with 7 men and 7 women, using motorcycle mirrors to ward off spirits. The work critiques the sedentarization of nomadic culture and is the first of 84 planned actions exploring "fugue" and "discretion" in semi-desert locations worldwide, with a video film to follow.