Performance/concert, 50’
Pelanda
Admission free while places last
an omniscience: an atmos-etheric, transnational, interplanetary cosmist bird opera spanning seven continents and the many verses
A new performance piece combining epic poetry and an original score, gathering the stories of the Arctic Tern. A bird that makes the longest migration of any creature, traveling annually from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back, equalling almost three trips to the moon and back over its thirty year lifespan. The viewer is invited to bring their binoculars and bird-watch, while the 7 performers–using air as a carrier for our messages–four woodwinds, 2 voices and a conductor, are adorned with wings and beaks.
This avian opera celebrates air, lightness, drifting, horizons, transnationalism and cosmism, while grieving the melting poles, the loss of home, the hunger, the defeat of not arriving and the loneliness of individualism. It insists on collectivity, social movements and non-linear ways of being. It attempts to re-route us, to go back and forth in time and offer an existential glimpse at our biped lives, and suggests drift as a mode of being (Terns can hover in mid-air for long periods of time) and air as a supportive ether for the circulation of a common path (of ideas) that runs across the ends of the earth, connecting the tundra to the tropics. The references span cultural legends of fantastical birds, flying the seven seas, the valleys, the realms. The bird becomes a prophet, a poet, an instructor, a politician, a philosopher, a guide. At the end, the music is the bird, a winged exception to our gravity-dependent bodies.
Featuring Roman costume designer Carlo Santolini’s masks and Neapolitan voice Cairo Clarke, developed in residency at Mattatoio. The opera will take place in the open spaces closed to the Tiber River.
An omniscience di Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser) è stato sostenuto e prodotto durante Prender-si cura edizione 2022, progetto di residenze di ricerca e produzione artistica realizzato negli spazi de La Pelanda.
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 history as a way 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 centres around ideas of time, interdependence and alterity. His performances and compositions use rhythm to codify, manipulate and deconstruct linear perceptions of time. they hint at intercultural entanglements, parallel histories and extra-human frames of reference.
www.himalisinghsoin.com/hdcollective
AN OMNISCIENCE, HYLOZOIC/DESIRES
co-commissioned by: Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden; Biennale Gherdeïna ∞, Ortisei; Radical Ecology; Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, Mattatoio Roma | Progetto Prender-si cura; & Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki, part of the program Kiasma Theatre e Serpentine, London, and part of General Ecology.
with thanks to:
Obsidian Coast for birdwatching with us
Bjørn Anders Nymoen for being chased by an angry tern and recording it
The residency at Mattatoio, Rome
The residency at Palm Heights, Cayman
The guidance of Eduard Demetz
composition by: David Soin Tappeser
poetry by: Himali Singh Soin
costumes tailored at Nanny’s
beaks by: Carlo Santolini
recording by: Friedemann Ploner
flute by: Elena D’Alò
oboe by: Claire Colombo
bass Flute by: Andrea Salvi
bass Clarinet by: Alessandro Malcangi
second voice by: Cairo Clarke
first voice by: Himali Singh Soin
conducted by: David Soin Tappeser