Desert Without Sand: Sequential Practices is a space for contemplation and investigation into the desert as both a physical landscape, an abstract concept, and a site for speculation. Through a cluster of activities, including performative reading, public events, and mapping and diagramming workshops, Sequential Practices aims to navigate and discuss multiple performative practices approaching to the desert’s complexity.
Second Sequence
Performance Mostafa Elbaroody — 18:00
Listening session Li Qihang — 19:00
Mostafa Elbaroody will perform Machines of Infinite Deferral. A conspiracy is unfolding in which the desert is not backdrop but operator, an active agent that conscripts speculative finance into its own logic. Finance does not impose order on the desert, it inherits its grammar: mirage, erosion, opacity, combustion. Both operate through perpetual approach, extracting value from a gap that must never close. The desert scales its hallucinations through derivatives, data, and securitized futures. Egypt’s New Administrative Capital emerges as a ritual site of this alignment, a mirage machine where sovereignty is constructed through its own erosion. Here, the desert infiltrates capital, bending it toward exhaustion and illusion, turning finance into the medium of its metaphysical operations.
Mostafa Elbaroody is a Cairo-based architect and visual artist. He has worked on architectural projects and taught computational design at the American University in Cairo and other educational settings. His artistic practice incorporates various forms of digital image production and processing, from generative design to immersive and interactive experiences, to imagine more representative and viable imaginaries for our co-dependency within ecological and technological systems. Drawing on speculative inquiry, Elbaroody creates visual worlds that sit between research and fiction, examining how we inhabit inherited systems and how we might imagine them otherwise.
Li Qihang is an artist based in Amsterdam. Her practice is underlined by the contemplation of in-betweenness as a state, bringing attention to moments of suspension from the routine, isolated in time, acting as gateways to access the subconscious. She experiences and feels those moments in an ongoing recording practice as a response and dialogue which primarily takes form in journaling and sound gathering.
