For the first time in almost 15 years, the artists Elmgreen & Dragset have returned to an installation they expected to ‘just disappear’. By Janelle Zara
When the Scandinavian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset erected Prada Marfa, a sculptural, non-functioning replica of a luxury Prada boutique, on the edge of a lonely west Texas highway, they imagined that it would end up like the remote Land Art of the 60s and 70s. In the absence of modern social media, it would quietly erode into the landscape before anyone ever really got a chance to see it.
“It would exist more as documentation and a rumor,” Dragset recalled, “and at some point just disappear.”
Image: Elmgreen & Dragset at Prada Marfa
Photograph: Katie Reese for The Guardian