A mirage produces the appearance of something that is either not there or radically different from how it is perceived. Set against the backdrop of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, this unstable threshold between fiction and reality becomes a paradigm for the landscape, understood as both appearance and desire.
The hotel assumes a central role: a place of arrival and departure, but also a suspended vantage point from which to observe the outside world. At once refuge and threshold, it embodies a mode of inhabiting in which identity is suspended and belonging remains temporary.
Mirage Hotel investigates the transience of the gaze — a condition intrinsic to photography itself. Here, photography becomes a device for measuring impermanence: the image does not aim to document reality, but to register its instability. What remains is not certainty, but a residual trace.
Photographs and texts by Francesco Villa
Editing by Altana
Design by Francesco Villa
Arabic Lettering by Samer Bou Saleh
Translations by Rabii Brahim, Sofia Schartner
12x16 cm, 128 pages,
Softcover, Open Spine binding, Hotfoiled dust jacket
Printed in 600 copies
ISBN 979-12-812-3216-7
