‘as grand as what’ (2019-2022) is a body of work by hylozoic/desires, which addresses the fundamental role of rituals and their imagery in both social and ecological systems. it comprises video, text, music and performance works, drawing on research into forgotten deities, animistic rituals and remedies, mystical geometries, old new materialism and spirit realism from the himalayas and volcanic borderlands.

a loss of symbols means we have been distanced from our capacity to make meaning, the capacity to inhabit a multiverse and a single atom at once. loss implying not that which has been lost, but an ongoing erasure of the interconnectedness between a here and now worldly world, and a transnationalist, cosmist place that allows the present moment to desire differently.

‘as grand as what’ insists on the importance of ceremony to conjure presence, as a spiritual tool to ground ourselves in the natural environments we inhabit. yet, it is also an inquiry into the problematic nature of ritual as an extension of existing (or desired) power structures (and relationships).

what - then - could a contemporary ritual look like? how could it allow for scientific evidence alongside syncretic symbolism, carve out space for utopian dreaming without oppression and extraction?

As Grand As What (2021) is a 3 channel video set between the Vesuvius volcano and the Indian Himalayas, and tells the story of a search for a lost bla, a subtle life force that runs through the world-body that has lost itself amid the crisis of the present moment.

A drummer calls upon li, a spirit manifestation of the human and non-human consciousness, to conduct a series of remedic rituals that recall bla into our bodies and into the planet. The palm-leaf masked figure embarks on a journey of grounding, circulation and regeneration, following the chakras of the body and the elements of the planet. With the help of the resonance of sound and the force of love poetry, they seek to reinvigorate the collective self and learn from the tremulous temporality of the catastrophic.

The original score, written for percussion, accordion, clarinet and dunchen, emanates from the thin places connecting magic and religion, ‘folk’ and ‘high’ culture, periphery and centre. The fast-paced 6/8 rhythm makes reference to the Tarantella, a music originally associated with women’s release of trauma through dance and consequently appropriated into the ‘western-classical cannon’ by composers like Chopin and liszt. The nonatonic scale, around which the composition is structured, alludes to Rag Pahadi, a popular early-evening raga in Hindustani Classical Music, with origins in folk melodies from the Himalayas.

while the music hints at the violences around these ambiguities of origin and ownership, it also blurs our sense of place, collapsing the distances between the Kumaon and Naples and complicating the power dynamics of north and south, reason and superstition.

as grand as what (2021) was commissioned and produced by TBA21, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the 13th Shanghai Biennale.

ancestors of the blue moon (2021)

a healing ritual with gongs, 45-60 min

ancestors of the blue moon (2021) combines flash fictions set in the Himalayas with a gong bath to bring us out of our crisis of lost presence. It evokes its animistic rituals and remedies, mystical geometries, old-new materialisms and spirit realisms.

These flash fictions come from the perspective of remote or forgotten deities. Deities protected by rites of secrecy or left out of archives. Deities invisible and formless. Deities incarnated as ruined objects, dangerous aspects or shadowy energies. They flow through our contemporary timescape, recounting the world they witness, transforming linear time into mythical time.

The performance unfolds over several stages: a guided transition into state of lucid dreaming; an immersive reading of extracts from Himali’s eponymous Prayer Book for forgotten non-male deities, ‘ancestors of the blue moon’; a bath of sound; a ceremony of tea from locally foraged herbs; and, optionally, a screening of the three-channel video work ‘as grand as what’ (2021).

in the spirit of the fountain (2020, re-edited 2022) is A magic realist tale in which a future ancestor encounters one from the past, from a volcano suddenly active due to seismic shifts in the Earth’s climatic core, to the volcanic remnants of Pompeii. In their encounter, they retain–and release–the tremors of the places that come before and after them. They purge the prejudices of the past even while they conserve the wisdom of their elders to guide them towards renewal.

Inspired by the Himalayan Jagar, a ritual in which ancestors are woken up to heal their kin, we call upon the spirits of place to conjure remedies for our contemporary crisis of lost presence. At Casa Della Fontana, (the House of the Large Fountain), a source of life, guided by the improvised sound of the drums, we indicate a path, channeling water and fire, forces of creation and destruction both.

Smoke becomes an instrument of illusion, in between the visible and invisible, between the core and the heaven, a quantum enchantment. A cymbal replaces the bronze oracular disc found at the cult of Here, who presided over functions that sounded the spirits of the dead. Listening as a way of connecting to molten time. Reaching out from within the mantle. Learning how to be after. Longing for the median where matter and spirit become interpenetrable. The medium through which we retrieve a collective life-force.

‘In the spirit of the fountain: a performance at pompeii’ was commissioned by the 13th Shanghai Biennale with TBA21 Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary and The Archaeological Park of Pompeii in the context of Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters. We thank the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation for the spark of volcanic presentism in Stromboli that inspired the 2022 re-edit.