Raphael Hefti

Five things you can’t wear on TV

b. Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, 1978
Based in Zürich, Switzerland

Five things you can’t wear on TV
33.708547, -116.399372
City of Palm Desert Homme-Adams Park
72500 Thrush Rd, Palm Desert, CA 92260
Desert X 2025

On View May 9 – 11, 2025

Growing up in the Alps, Swiss artist Raphael Hefti developed a deep understanding of landscape shaped by the dramatic evidence of tectonic pressure. Conditioned by the surrounding mountains, he later discovered the expansive horizontality of the desert. His work, Five things you can’t wear on TV, explores perception and immateriality through a scientific lens. He repurposes new technologies and industrial products to create effects that diverge from their original intentions.

In this piece, Hefti uses a black woven polymer fiber, originally designed for light but durable fire hoses, coated on one side with a reflective finish. Tension holds this flat band of material overhead between two distant points, forming a single line or artificial horizon. The enormous force held in the taut material causes it to oscillate in the wind. This vibration resembles a gently strummed guitar string, creating a visual harmonic that resonates with the surrounding landscape.

The effect is disorienting. As the oscillating line strives to assert its presence, it blurs our sense of spatial perception, scale, and distance in its kinetic dance. Wind, weather, and ambient light amplify this seemingly arbitrary choreography, transforming it into an environmental condition. This phenomenon evokes the flicker of endless desert horizons, where hard lines dissolve in the heat haze, continuously softening and reforming before our eyes.

By splitting the air in front of us, Five things you can’t wear on TV brings the effects of great distance to proximity. It draws our attention to the ongoing performance of light and space, expressing the borrowed poetry of a climactic phenomenon.

Generous support is provided by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and the City of Palm Desert.