static range
static range
Static Range is a multi-disciplinary and multi-limbed project by artist and writer Himali Singh soin. it uses a real-life spy-story in the Indian Himalayas as a springboard for speculations and reflections about nuclear culture, porosity, leakages, toxicity and love, spiritual-scientific entanglements, environmental catastrophe and post-nation states. This series of transmissions that make up 'static range', include an animated stamp, letters, music, embroidery, healing, planting and a performance installation.
channeling Himali’s ideas about uncanny relationships and interdependencies, I composed soundscapes for a number of works in the series.
Static Range
Video animation, color, sound, 15 min loop, 2021
In 1965 the CIA and the Indian Intelligence Bureau together plotted to intercept Chinese nuclear missile data by installing a nuclear-powered surveil- lance device on the peak Nanda Devi. A terrible storm interrupted the mission, and the device— which contained nearly half the plutonium in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—was abandoned on the mountainside. Although the whereabouts of the Cold War–era apparatus remain unknown today, locals believe it has transformed the eco-system and continues to cause sickness in neighbouring communities.
In 1988 the mountain appeared on a Indian postal stamp, based on a picture taken by Himali’s father, mountaineer and explorer Mandip Singh Soin.
Taking its cue from these uncanny entanglements, the video takes the form of a love letter from the spy device to the mountain. Recounting what it has seen, it ruminates on the strange metamorphosis of this sacred terrain. As Soin’s poetry gives voice to nonhuman witnesses, her video animation grapples with the slow spectacle of environmental violence: the stamp and the mountain morph resplendently, as though subjected to nuclear radiation. Transfixed by the landscape’s mutilation and caught in this epistolary exchange, we are both spectators and actors in this planetary drama.
Nagada Drums, copper and goat hide, by Sudama Lal Tamta, 2020.
Following the work’s underlying theme of transmission and interception, its music imagines that the spy device, which operated like a giant radio antennae trying to intercept signals sent by ballistic missiles to their ground stations for location and coordinates, also picked up frequencies from underground Uighur music (whose home is the area in which the nuclear missile tests were conducted). The music plays with faults, interference and mutations that have deformed the music since its interception and references overlaps and continuities with the local music of the Kumaoni and Garhwal region in which Nanda Devi is located.
The entire soundscape is based on recordings of nagada drums, paired kettle drums that are used extensively in Uighur as well Kumaoni music. We used a pair of these drums, specifically handcrafted for the occasion by Sudama Lal Tamta, one of the few remaining artisans to produce these drums locally in Almora, to perform rhythms featured in Uighur Sufi music.
An Affirmation
video, color, sound, 15 min loop, 2022
An Affirmation takes the form of a letter that re- sponds to the video Static Range. It is written by “mountain” and addressed to “my friend, the atom.” It was filmed on the periphery of Sellafield, a decommissioned nuclear plant nestled in the picturesque Lake District in northwest England. As the mountain laments the decay of its familial bonds with the surrounding environment, the effects of radioactivity begin to glitch the landscape. A healer places her hands on the artist, who becomes a conduit, and makes signs, as if attempting to send long-term warning messages. She sends beams of energy to the glacial lake
Wast Water, which feeds the nuclear site. Landscapes and bodies glow, though it is unclear if this is due to cosmic rays or nuclear radiation.
The work is surreal, visually and sonically. The accompanying soundscape consists of recordings of choirs who are based near the nuclear facilities at Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Sellafield. Their voices were manipulated to echo the toll of emergency alarms: an aural evocation of the transnational entanglement of remote exclusion zones. As the mountain tells the atom, “This letter holds many elsewheres together.”
Static Range: Body of Light
performance, 45 min, 2022
Body of light is a performance piece, featuring an epistolary reading of the letter of the static range series. the invocation of the nuclear mountain is set in an immersive landscape of healing dismantlements, decaying projections and soundscapes of ambiguity.
In addition to rhythmic interferences on nagada drums that slowly morph into a bath of healing gong sounds, the performance is sustained by a all-enveloping, surround-sound drone composition.
Body of Light was commissioned as part of Back to Earth LIVE. We are grateful for the support by Holly Shuttleworth and L-Accoustics.
The form of danger is an emanation of energy, 2022, sound, 15 min, exhibition detail, Himali Singh Soin: Static Range, Art Institute of Chicago, 2022.