"Déserts was created to accompany a live performance of the work of avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1885-1965). The Ensemble Modern, a contemporary music group based in Frankfurt, commissioned Viola to create a visual score for Varèse's Déserts after discovering notes by the composer referring to an unrealized image component of his composition." "Déserts is a film from 1994 with visual improvisations to a powerful orchestral work by Edgard Varèse. Here, too, Viola explores the extremes of physical and mental experience, this time by using the desolate expanses of the desert and the sea as metaphors for loneliness. He does this on the basis of a statement by Varèse in which nature is compared to the elusive parts of the mind that reflect the world of mystery and existential loneliness".