Season 3 Episode 4 of the MLE Podcast

“Sitting with the Drift”: Imagination, Speculation, and Reenchanted Futures with Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser

To be released on Thursday 26th February!

Hosted by Dr Johanna Magin. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer and Acast.

Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser are forces to behold. As they describe themselves, they are “an artist duo whose work combines poetry and music to conjure speculative futures and multiverses.” Their collective, which you’ll hear more about in our conversation, is “Hylozoic/Desires,” or H/D. H/D “aspires toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or human—are equal. 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.”

Although we didn’t have the benefit of being immersed in the materiality of their art, speaking to Himali and David nonetheless revealed the dizzying scope and depth of their art-making, and the ethical-epistemological questions that drive much of their work. One could call their work multimodal and polychronological, a collaboration of disciplines and a commingling of scales; but perhaps more to the point, it strikes one as eminently enactive. Through the unusual forms it inhabits – whether performance, installation, or both – it manages to probe such archetypal matters as presence, love, doubt, mutuality, materiality, subjectivity, reenchantment, climate grief, futurity, anticoloniality, truth, and the archive—but in ways that subtly upend our usual affordances and habits of mind. Our conversation was similarly wide-ranging: we discussed how a serious consideration of something as simple as salt reveals unbidden layers of colonial history and power relations; how “sitting with the drift,” or embracing illegibility and doubt, can constitute viable epistemologies; how archival history is never really a depoliticised affair; how past, present, and future can work in ways that are completely nonlinear; how love can be a powerful technology of knowing that helps us think about regenerative futures; and how art can occasion important perceptual shifts, when other modes of communication fail. The conversation was nothing short of an anthem for the necessity of art in times such as these, and a speculative ode to futures we’ve yet to imagine.

Hylozoic/Desires’ work has recently been exhibited at Serpentine, London; Desert X, CA; Shanghai Biennale; Biennale Gherdeina; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Swiss Institute, NYC; Serendipity, Goa; MACBA, Barcelona, among others. More recently, they have participated in the Sharjah biennale and the Bukhara biennale. They have had solo exhibitions at Somerset House and Tate Britain in London.