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Desert X 2023 has closed. This installation is no longer on view.

Hylozoic/Desires

Namak Nazar

Founded 2016, based between London and Delhi

Himali Singh Soin (b. Delhi, India, 1987)
David Soin Tappeser (b. Bonn, Germany, 1985)

Namak Nazar
33.965665, -116.583173
Worsley Road between Pierson and Mission Lakes Boulevards
Desert Hot Springs, California, USA
Desert X 2023

Hylozoic/Desires, or h/d, comprises Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser, a multimedia poet-musician duo whose work centers around the rhythms of love and the beat of belonging. h/d’s methodology involves research into place and history to develop new speculative futures utilizing the musical tradition of jazz and the literary tradition of poetry. Their practice centers around ideas of time, interdependence and alterity. Their works use rhythm to codify, manipulate and deconstruct linear perceptions of time and hint at intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference.

h/d uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. For Desert X, they find this metaphor in salt. Inspired by the proliferation of conspiracies — UFOlogists, Scientologists, cybernetic spiritualists, Area 51, flat-earthers, lizard people and chemtrails — h/d has created a wooden pillar that branches into loudspeakers that spew an imaginary conspiracy theory about Namak Nazar, a particle of salt that spells the doom of climate change and offers redemption by looking inward. The particle appears to climb up and crystalize over the trunk of the pole, connecting the salt found in the stories from the loudspeaker to the physical desert landscape, where salt lines forecast droughts and floods to come and salt songs describe the sacred geometry of the desert before settler colonialism.

Visitors are invited to join h/d in thinking through ecological loss and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love in their immersive audio-visual environment.

Read a note from the artists here.

Mixing and mastering by Tommie Introna & Brian J. Sulpizio. Production by Anton Lieberman, assisted by Brian Taylor.

This artwork is powered by the Sun and SOLARPUNKS.

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