An artist's book based on Laila Hida's long-term project exploring fantasized representations of palm trees, the desert, and oases in Western popular culture.
Laila Hida has focused on the Phoenix dactylifera date palm, collecting screenshots, press cuttings, postcards and souvenir objects, and delving into literature and scientific texts, in order to trace its peregrinations. She has travelled extensively, even in time. Starting out from colonial Morocco, she followed this plant first to the French Riviera and then across the Atlantic, to California. The date palm has become a symbol, composed of multiple layers of historical narrative and collective myths, from 19th-century travel literature to painting, photography and the cinema, as well as tourist imagery, architecture, landscaping and urban embellishment.
Published by Éditions du Jeu de Paume, this book is part of a project undertaken over the course of some fifteen years by Laila Hida on the representations of palm trees, the desert, and oases in the art, cinema, and photography of the 20th and 21st centuries. By compiling a vast array of images of palm trees, this book aims to illustrate the aesthetic accumulation of this motif and the way in which Western popular culture has shaped the romanticized imagination of the desert and oases.
Published on the occasion of Laila Hida's exhibition organized by the Jeu de Paume at the Château de Tours from June 19 to November 8, 2026.
Laila Hida (born 1983 in Casablanca ) has been building a body of work in which different types of practices intertwine, resulting in installations that blend her own photographs with a variety of archival fragments. Whether created alone or in collaboration with others, her projects continually question the use and fictional power of images in the fabrication of myths about the Orient. Enriched by an uninterrupted flow of images and the many journeys the artist has made since 2016 to the Tighmert Oasis, on the edge of the Sahara, her practice examines how an exotic aesthetic and a tourist identity have been constructed, as well as the knowledge produced and disseminated since the colonial period.
