How can we speak of You, who has no form, no taste, no colour, no odour, but permeates all beings as life’s essence, a worlding omnipresent everlasting..
Without You, what have we?
How would the sea look without You? Would we be able to cry out
since only salt and sand remained from the tears..
(a voice in the wilderness..)
E r e m o s
a sojourn devoid of place
Eremos (ἐρημος) is a Greek word
meaning "wilderness" or "desert”
From Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁mós (“dark”)
from Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁-(“to separate”)
(Wiki)
Welcome to the desert of the Real.
(Slavoj Zizek)
At last all wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth,
all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food.
Some of our wise men turned to the contemplation of deserts. …
Stay in the desert long enough and you could apprehend the absolute.
(Margaret Atwood ‘Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet’)
For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth.
(Deleuze & Guatarri “Anti-Oedipus”)
"What can we do when war overshadows the social imagination? The only thing we can do is to desert."
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Eremos is an audiovisual set and installation that voices out the crises of our time that we experience on so many levels - from ecology and extinction of species to the socio-political tensions and stagnation of the “world which is slow to change”, till the point when it is too late.
Yet, beneath the surface, Eremos speaks about water, and nothing else, but does it apophatically, starting from its absence. *
“The figure of the desert is an ambiguous terrain of both loss and salvation, - as Aidan Tynan noticed in his book on deserts. It’s here, in this disenchanted spaciousness, that we can feel this essential gap - ‘the gap between Life and that which is conceived as before or without Life’*. This gap, - continues Tynan, is a ‘scarred region’ of the contemporary global imaginary that informs how we think and feel about fossil fuels, extraterrestrial exploration and apocalyptic futures.”
In this project, we try to avoid single-minded solutions and narrow depictions of what is happening or should be done. This work rather aims to pose questions through the image of the desert, treating it as both a warning and a potential exit, but situating these domains of meaning within different frameworks.
“To be in the world but not of it”, as it was suggested by Gilles Grelet in his “Theory of the solitary sailor,” is one of the main directives of this work.
The imagery of the desert is hauntological, it is a non-place that hides in its sands a cosmology of the psyche and that of the world.
It might appear as a dark night of the soul, but also as a zero point before a restart - a seed for revolt.
In spite of the dominating in our minds and society dogmas, the figure of the desert is egalitarian and cosmopolitical in essence. It is no-man’s land - a pure angelic realm that exists with another logic, which perhaps can be actualised solely by hermits or groups of nomads and anachorites.**
It is here, in exile and solitude, that we can find the connection with the spiritual, and, paradoxically, with the collective at a more profound level. On a large scale, desert can be seen as a subconscious domain, but also as a morphic field that collects and conveys our experience and a collective memory. ***
The desert, in a sense, is both a private space and a collective dream.
Within the interplay of these motifs, by sliding on the sand’s surfaces and diving in the abyss, by risking to be swallowed by the void, we seek to imagine another world, we move towards possible, though it might be a mirage, with an uneven gait, as fremens from “The Dune” taught us.
Sonically, the set is based on the media of the sea and tears, bereft of water, namely, sand and salt, and electricity discharges recorded with sensitive piezo sensors, microphones, and wires processed with Max/MSP and other software. Among procedural techniques are psychoacoustic ones, such as near-antiphase, where sound waves approach their opposites almost exactly, so that we hear the sound drowning in silence, as if submerged underwater, and then bursting forth… like a scream with a closed mouth.
The sound seems to be absent, but the tension is felt through occasional artifacts. These artifacts are being exemplified to the limits of their expenditure.
The resulting canvas of sonic movements is connected to visuals through synchronisation algorithms that are sensitive to the entire sonar spectrogram, creating a wide range of associations in the audience's perception and situating spectators in a non-place of high intensity.
The set was performed with a visual artist Mike Iv at Doc11, Berlin, in December 2024, and is now in preparation for realisation as an intermedia multichannel installation. (We are looking for funds!)
The installation
The installation invites the audience to witness sand dunes within a gallery space. The dunes are surrounded by marked boundaries on the floor. Over time, the sand seeps beyond these lines, propelled by a polyrhythmic beat from “Worm callers” (as in “Dune”) positioned throughout the room and triggered at varying speeds via Max MSP—intertwining complex sonic processions with the sand's movement.
Sand-washed borders are here to emphasize the superficial formality and caricaturishness of such separateness in the face of the global catastrophe and the challenges we, as humans, are going through at the moment.
Starting from the simple rhythm of a single caller that can wake the Worm, the sound gains spatiality and volume through the inclusion of others, multiple callers, creating a complex polyrhythmic structure which is gradually turning into spatial waves of chorus, reminding one of the sound of the desert wind.
The figure of the desert wind is of utmost importance here. According to many mystical traditions associated with the desert, the desert wind signifies the spirit that brings irreversible, dramatic change to the existing order of things.
Using a metaphorical language of “Dunes,” this installation gestures towards our actions - mundane repetitions of a machinic unconsciousness routine that is leading to a catastrophe by waking the element that can erase us.
Simultaneously, by turning the pulse into a rhythmically unrecognisable choir of a multitude of callers, we aim to invoke a wind of change.
Besides other things, sonically, the work refers to Ligeti’s famous piece with metronomes but reinterprets it by layering a new mythology and complex issues of our time.
The installation also consists of video projections employing an audio-reactive particle simulation of the desert wind, made in Unreal Engine and connected to the callers through Max MSP, so we can see the sand particles and the wind set in motion by these callers. The projections are meant to be situated on one or more walls around the sand.
As our experience shows, the project can be enriched by various auxiliary options and features throughout the process, leading to the emergence of interactive elements and additional sonic, visual, and conceptual layers.
One of the hypothetical ancillary directions would be to work with archival images such as old photographs that might pop up and dissolve in the sand in some programmed situations, subtly conjuring a sense of collective memory beyond time in an ambivalent way - hinting at retroactive causality and reflection through which we can perhaps influence the future and sense the interconnectedness of all things, but also as a sign of the possible transformation if not dissipation of human subjectivity as we know it.
* “I was the object of a question outside my line of duty. It was there, but did not insist, called my name gently so as not to scare me. But I had no way of keeping track of the sound of its voice. So I called it absence. . .” (Edmond Jabes)
* Tynan quotes Elizabeth A. Povinelli
** angelism by Lardreau and Jambet, as well as Vladimir Shallar
*** a theory of morphogenetic fields by Rupert Sheldrake
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Snezhana Reizen - sound, composition, conceptual framework, text, imagery, visual art - particle simulation
Mike Iv - generative visual art - geometric transformations, visual projections
For more context and content, please visit our “Zero Night” page.
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© 2025