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’)
The wind of the spirit blows only in the desert.
(Edmond Jabes)
For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth.
(Deleuze & Guatarri “Anti-Oedipus”)
Named after the Greek ἔρημος — wilderness, desert — Eremos presents a constellation of independent multimedia experiments that give voice to the crises of our time, experienced on so many levels, posing questions through the evocative image of the desert and employing cosmological, mythological, and ecological perspectives.
The project invites a collaborative investigation in the form of an audio-visual V/A album and multimedia online exhibition.
"What can we do when war overshadows the social imagination? The only thing we can do is to desert."
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Voltage. Vicious Circuit
see more
It may appear as a cryptographic device, a technological image, or a number of sonic fiction pieces that reimagine the figure of the desert with all its ambivalence and dialectics. In fact, whenever we speak about music or any sonic phenomenon, we inexorably enter this liminal space out of place — a sonorous desert.
It is a tricky thing to speak on behalf of it, as it is intrinsically unspeakable and hence seems to demand to speak on its own. Yet, as Edmond Jabès once noted: “We know of silence only what words can tell us. Whether you like it or not.” So I will try, at least, to hint at some of the semantic dimensions I find behind its flows.
The famous desert traveller Isabelle Eberhardt once wrote that if something exists in this space of wilderness, then it is time. I am not sure; it depends on how we decide to interpret that. Yet this project spirals around the question of time in a rather intriguing — at least for me — manner, beginning with the very way it exhibits itself. It is coming out one circle after my “Desert Island”, although it was recorded before it. “Inexorably,” writes Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time, “the study of time does nothing but return us to ourselves.”
And so does the figure of the desert.
It is worth noting that the desert we encounter here is not a landscape in a Quinean sense. It implies neither literal less nor more, nor explicitly nothing; it embodies precisely this “neither-nor” mixed with “either-or” — a radical openness, dynamic and destabilising, meta-local and trans-historical.
“The figure of the desert is an ambiguous terrain of both loss and salvation,” as Aidan Tynan observes in his book on deserts. “It is 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’”, as it was noted by Elizabeth A. Povinelli. This gap, Tynan continues, is a “scarred region” of the contemporary global imaginary that informs how we think and feel about fossil fuels, extraterrestrial exploration, and apocalyptic futures.
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. On a larger scale, the desert, understood as a subconscious domain, can convey our collective experience and memory.
It might appear as intimate as a dark night of the soul, but also as universal as hope, a zero point before a restart or a seed for revolt.
Nuqta (نقطة) is an audio-visual piece by Zero Night (Snezhana Reizen and Mike Iv) elaborating on the ancient Persian heretic cosmology - Nuqtavism. Derived from an Arabic word meaning "dot" or "point", this piece draws on Nuqtavism, a heretical atomist cosmology and esoteric movement founded in 14th-century Iran by Mahmoud Pasikhani. As Abbas Amanat said, unveiling their doctrine of “UNIVERSAL CONCILIATION”, this movement consisted of almost exclusively Persian émigrés, refugees and self-exiles to India who escaped persecution in Safavid Iran. Nuqtavism pushed Islamic mysticism past its limits into a radical, quasi-materialistic, and cyclical view of the universe. At the absolute center of their cosmology sits the nuqta, an atomic, indivisible point whose unseen movements and oscillations generate letters, physical forms, and entire physical worlds. Seeing history and time to be organized into periodic cosmic cycles, generated by the movement of the nuqta, Nuqtavis believed that each cycle generates a new god, essentially "reprogramming" existence periodically. Inspired by this prophetic cosmology, this work by Zero Night (Snezhana Reizen and Mike Iv) conjures a similar process by reprogramming the underlying atomic structures and symbols contained within sounds (derived from electrical discharges) and visual elements (based on particle simulation), merging them into an intense and interrelational field - a dynamic topology of bursting and fading cycles.
“But isn’t the desert a paradoxical figure of the aporia?” asked Derrida.
And aren’t we all, in a way, here — at a point of radical uncertainty, without an orienter, going through loss while still carrying remnants of hope for salvation, in an era of artificialisation and desertification at every level of our lives?
Isn’t it time to intervene in the patterns that constitute the world we inherit — with the daggers we may pilfer from angels*, one of which may appear as focus: a directed attention?
This directed attention as the basis for both creation and transformation is the main theme of my ongoing research project “U”, which has grown out of Eremos and is, I believe, coming soon.
*“With the daggers
I pilfered from an angel
I build my dwelling”
are lines from a poem by Edmond Jabès.
“You will never walk far enough,”
as he wrote in "If There Were Anywhere but Desert”.
So
Welcome to the desert
What is Real?
© 2026