From the Archive | Spring 2024 Residency
The Residency
At Alserkal Arts Foundation, Hylozoic/Desires extended their research on two elements, residues, mediums: salt and oil, to begin the research on a new film.
How do visions for the future locate and manifest themselves? Which spaces, fields, societies are these new aspirations projected onto? What languages and metaphors do they inhabit? How do they root themselves in tradition and historical trajectories? How - if at all - can these maps be re-formulated by cultural practitioners?
Taking their cue from the last radical questioning of the Anglo-Saxon model from within - which posited free-jazz, beat poetry and imaginaries of outer space as routes to individual and collective liberation - they intended to draw on the rich and varied traditions of poetry and improvised musics in the MEASA region to further their research into future imaginaries, with a focus on two specific materialities that become visual, aesthetic and cultural semiotics to guide them on their way.
Biographies
Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser) is a multi-media performance duo whose work combines experimental poetry and original music in order to conjure borgesian, 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 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.
Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences and entanglements. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love.
david soin tappeser is a drummer, composer and performance artist based between London and New Delhi. his practice explores socio-eco-spiritual-tempo-somatic dimensions of sound. his performances and compositions use rhythm to unearth, manipulate and deconstruct linear perceptions of time, interdependence and alterity. they hint at intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference while thinking about environmental destruction and sociopolitical fissures.
Alserkal Arts Foundation hosts two residency cycles per year. Since these began in 2017, it has hosted 34 artists and researchers from multiple disciplines. The foundation welcomes practitioners from all fields of academic or practice-led inquiry, supporting critical and intellectually curious projects that impact the regional cultural sphere.
Learn more about the residency programme here.
Public Programmes
Ancestors of the Blue Moon
Himali Singh Soin and David Tappeser aka Hylozoic/Desires took us on a captivating odyssey with their public programme, Ancestors of the Blue Moon. A gong bath and flash fictions combined body and mind to unravel 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 reshape 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), delved 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 narrated a quest for a lost collective life force (bla or prana). This immersive journey unfolded through processes of grounding, circulation, and regeneration.
On Translucency
Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser concluded this year’s Majlis Talks with their poignant, atmospheric lecture-performance ‘On Translucency’ - a mytho-poetic manifesto about the space between the shore and the tide, the translucent shallow, visible and invisible, dense and sheer. Himali’s poetic essay on the aesthetics of understanding, accompanied by David’s musical composition on instruments crafted with found objects from a sabhka and the seashore, took the audiences on a mytho-poetic journey unlike any other.
It departs from Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity and arrives in places where frosted windows keep the heat of the sun out, soften the detailed edges of bodies while holding on to the relational, letting light through and not shutting out the other. Translucency argues for a kind of not-knowing that allows for the private world of thought and the gregarious world of friendship, as island to archipelago. This manifesto is filtered through the translucent lenses of air, ice, skin, oil and film. Translucency is both the right to illegibility and the desire for interpretation.
Photographs by Ibrahim Ahmed.
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