Hylozoic/Desires, the long-running collaboration between Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser (henceforth H/D) occupies a space where art is a mode of listening to worlds that often slip beneath the surface of perceptibility. They inaugurated their collaborative project with You Really Got Me Now in 2016. Their practice moves across performance, sound, video, storytelling, ecology and speculative thought, operating as a kind of atmospheric sensor: attuned to faint tremors in climate, geopolitics and myth, and translating them into forms of attention and relation.
Their collaboration takes its name “Hylozoic/Desires” from the ancient philosophical idea of hylozoism: the belief that all matter is alive, even if it does not resemble what we ordinarily call “alive.” They treat this belief neither as dogma nor as metaphor, but as a working principle. Matter -- glaciers, pollen, sands, radio static, warm breaths, disappearing coastlines -- appears in their work as companion, informant and witness.
The “desires” interwoven into this hylozoic world are not human wants alone, but the longings, agencies or tendencies of non-human things. For instance, You Really Got Me Now charts a love story across 15 years and 3 continents, where found radio frequencies and drifting sonic fragments behave like wayward signals searching for receivers, carrying their own itineraries of longing across atmospheric static. Salt Lines -- the artist duo’s first solo exhibition in India, currently showing at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum -- includes Salt Prints (2024) and the video The Hedge of Halomancy (2025), which look at how salt crystals continually swell, crust and collapse, following their own mineral impulses in response to humidity, temperature and touch. In Salt Prints (a series with individual titles), the artists have used a 19th-century technique that employs salt to develop photographs, transforming the subject to medium as well. These works reveal how H/D treat matter as possessing its own tendencies, moods and trajectories, each material reaching outward in its own quiet, persistent way.
H/D explain where they are coming from by invoking The Indian Salt Hedge -- one of the protagonists of the multimedia installation The Hedge of Halomancy -- which was a massive barrier built by British India from the Indus river to the Bay of Bengal in the 19th century, to prevent the smuggling of salt. “Just as the Hedge, this enormous infrastructure with deeply impenetrable parts, is eaten into by termites, turning it into dust, we think of material and spiritual worlds often at the threshold of one another. There is a thin space between fact and fiction, between the material and the immaterial, and that is the world that Hylozoism plays in.”
This expansive way of thinking has shaped the duo’s evolving body of work. Soin, with her background in literature and performance, brings a language that gives their texts a drifting, incantatory quality. Her writing often reads like a message transmitted from several temporalities at once. Tappeser, trained as a percussionist and composer, carries an awareness of rhythm and silence. His sonic compositions do not merely accompany the visual or textual; they create conditions for listening that dislodge habitual patterns of perception. When these two sensibilities meet, what emerges is neither sound-led nor text-led, but a kind of hybrid sensorium that dissolves the boundaries between mediums.
Their practice is not anchored to any single geography. They move fluidly between places and histories -- Delhi, London, Ladakh, Venice, Sharjah, Bukhara, the Indian Ocean -- in works that trace asymmetries of power through environmental metaphors. A project might start with a scientific anomaly, a stray rumour, or an archival scrap. “The salt series came about when we visited the Salton Sea in California and found salt-encrusted fish dying on its shores. Perhaps, we thought, just as there are tree lines and snow lines, soon the world, with its evaporating waters, will have salt lines,” explains H/D about what drew them to the subject matter of salt. “Just as Lot’s wife turns to a pillar of salt for being disobedient, and Gandhi picks up a fist of salt as an act of disobedience, we had found our disobedient subject. A perfect acid and base, a destroyer and preserver, salt is a symbol of equilibrium.”
What matters most is the path the chosen subject opens, the companions it gathers, the listening it enables. In Lapsus/Kairos (2017), for instance, the duo approached time itself as a material that slips, folds and accumulates, asking how chance and rupture reconfigure both personal and planetary histories.
The duo layers text, sound, object and gesture in ways that blur the distinction between what is being documented and what is being conjured. This strategy of uncertainty is not evasive but generative: it invites audiences to step into shared speculation, to become co-thinkers rather than viewers. For example, in You Really Got Me Now, H/D layer together found radio transmissions, textual fragments, performed gesture and live percussion to create a field in which it becomes impossible to distinguish what is an archival trace and what is speculative fiction.
Hylozoic/Desires often works with the form of correspondence -- letters written to species, objects and landscapes. These letters, though fictional in an obvious sense, create an intimacy that destabilizes the hierarchy between human and non-human. In Lapsus/Kairos, they compose letters to kairos (time) as if it were a sentient partner. In as grand as what (2018-2020), there are no “letters” in a literal text-on-page sense, but the work incorporates voiced monologues by Himalayan deities, forgotten, remote or protected by rites of secrecy, that behave like letters to weather and place -- particularly to fog, shifting atmospheres, and spectral terrains across the Himalayas.
An emphasis on porousness runs through H/D’s understanding of the self. For them, the “self” is not an isolated subject but a constellation of forces: ancestry, climate, memory, politics, and the things that surround us. The duo often works with the idea that identity is shaped as much by the stones beneath our feet, as by the stories passed down through families. To be alive is to be in continuous negotiation with environments that far exceed human timescales.
Their practice also grapples with the afterlives of colonialism. Soin, especially, approaches climate not only as an ecological crisis but as an historical one. The climatic violence experienced today is inseparable from centuries of extraction, resource theft and geopolitical domination. Through Tappeser’s compositions, the sonic textures of colonial modernity -- machines, militaries, bureaucracies -- are disassembled and remixed. Their work together folds these critiques into poetic and sensorial forms, resisting didacticism while refusing political neutrality.
Speaking about some of the questions that preoccupy them right now, H/D state, “The Hedge of Halomancy was made during a year where liberation was on all our minds. Through witnessing Palestine, through the rise of the robots. How do we claim our collective conscience and enact it? What is the path to liberation and have we been looking at the idea of freedom or forgiveness all wrong this whole time? Is it, rather than something that is given or taken, maybe a thing that sits inside us, like a virtue. What is the path to justice? The non-human world helps us understand what mutuality might look like.”
The duo describes their practice as “speculative,” but this does not mean it is untethered from reality. Rather, speculation functions as a method for imagining futures that are not yet available within conventional frameworks. They turn to science fiction, myth, folklore and quantum theory not as escape routes but as tools for thinking otherwise. In their work, the future is not a timeline but a mood -- a shimmering horizon of possibility that presses against the present. In as grand as what for instance, a live multi-media performance combining text, film and music enacts a “rite of renewal” that draws on Himalayan cosmologies, sacred geometry and ritual soundscapes to imagine a transnational, cosmically entangled future. The work collapses distances -- between mountains and volcanoes, between geographies and mythic imaginaries -- and proposes a new ontological horizon grounded in earth-spirit relationships.
At its core, H/D’s larger practice invites audiences to consider what forms of life and knowledge remain unacknowledged, urging us to think of the planet not as a resource but as a companion, and to imagine a world where all matter hums with memory, desire and story. Above all, it reflects a slower, more capacious way of paying attention -- one that might allow us to sense the delicate vibrations of worlds in crisis.
Salt Lines is on view at Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum from December 6, 2025 to February 8, 2026.
Gitanjali Dang is an independent art curator and critic based out of Mumbai.