Ancestors of the Blue Moon

How can new rituals bring us out of our crisis of lost presence?

On 8th February 2024, Hylozoic/Desires (Himali and David) took us on a captivating odyssey with their public programme ‘Ancestors of the Blue Moon’. A gong bath and flash fictions combine body and mind that unraveled the lives of remote Himalayan deities, hidden in the folds of secrecy or forgotten in archives. Manifested as weathered objects or elusive energies, these divine narratives reshaped our perception of time and nature, weaving a mythical tapestry of contemporary life.

This participatory performance - part of a larger body of work by the duo, the film, ‘As Grand As What’ (2021), delves into the essential role of rituals and their imagery in both social and ecological systems. Drawing from research on ancestral healing rituals in the Himalayas and visualizing the Buddhist Kalachakra (Wheel of Time) mandala, it narrates a quest for a lost collective life force (bla or prana). This immersive journey unfolded through processes of grounding, circulation, and regeneration.


About the Resident

Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser) is an artist duo whose work combines poetry and music to conjure speculative futures and multiverses. H/D aspire toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or human—are equal. They skew the linear imagination of time and space to produce divergences that elicit critical wonder. H/D’s research orbits around (non)place and histories of migration, transnationalism and environmental cosmism to learn from the multiple materialities of contemporary existence. They are concerned with the (poly)rhythms of love and the bea(s)t of belonging. Hylozoic/Desires use metaphor as an event, as a force of attraction that holds otherwise distant entities together.