Art Now Hylozoic/Desires

"The installation considers the “hedge” as a poetic and political space, a partition full of perforations that continue to fray, tear and rip into our present. The hedge becomes both an infrastructure of slow violence and a garden of resistance. In these vegetal worlds that grow, ripen and rot, smuggling becomes an informal network of exchange and rebellion. Indigenous knowledge is a decolonial tool. The material and spiritual are permeable.

The video’s protagonist, Mayalee, is inspired by a courtesan who defied the British Empire’s attempts to cut off her stipends, which were made in mounds of salt. Mayalee uses salt to conduct halomancy (salt divinations). Perhaps one of her prophecies reaches across the hedge to Allan Octavian Hume, the hedge’s British commissioner, and changes the course of history. Ornithologist, botanist and staunch colonialist, Hume finds his belief in the Empire slowly eroding.

Parts of the hedge are burnt down in the 1857 uprising. It is eaten by termites and infested by field rats. The hedge, it seems, is resisting the Empire. Watching his colonial endeavour crumble, Hume joins the occult Theosophical Society and begins to practise transcendental communication. He becomes an ally of the Indian liberation movement, co-founding the Indian National Congress. Half a century later, Gandhi, leader of the Congress, stages a Salt March against the British salt monopoly. By 1947, India is free from British rule, but independence comes at a price: the land must be partitioned."

- Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser)

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