lrene Campolmi:

 

Himali is an incredible artist, poet, and performer. And many more I would say like, working with different media.

 

And in this case, Thinking Like an Island was not an obvious choice, so to say, but literally, a decision that was connected to the idea of an island as a form of escape, and an island as this kind of ecosystem, microcosmos, that that could exist on its own, and yet is very much connected and dependent on external component, or always included within an archipelago. So with this work, we were actually interested in, again, letting the language become a means and a poetic means to access another dimension, a dimension where necessarily, it wouldn't be the syntax to create meaning to the languages, but it would be the placement, the different disposition to create the poetic means.

 

Daniela Ruiz Moreno:

 

This is only one of the two works that we're presenting from Himali in this exhibition. We will see the second one on the second floor. I think it's very interesting. And this is the first time that this visual poetry poem has been translated into Chinese. So we can see on the left the English version, which is the original one, and on the right the Chinese version, which of course added something very special, in our view. And again, it was important, this work, because it talks about collaboration, but it talks as well about how the commonalities and the continuities that we have, that humans have with nature, if we can think of it as a continuum. Because in this poem, if we look at it closer, Himali is talking about the situations of origin, of life and death. And she uses the “we” constantly in the poem. We don't want to know whether she's talking about a human, the being that can think, that has rationality, or an island because it's a constant continuum.

 

lrene Campolmi:

Radar Level is the second work that we are presenting of Himali, and shows the multifaceted practice of the artist. It's a film installation, that is set in the world’s last geological minutes in two very defined and ancient landscapes—one of which is the northern hemisphere in Mongolia, and the other one is the southern constellation in Namibia. What we see is actually these two almost opposite sides of the world, and at the same time, very embedded and kind of connected. So the idea is really to present this duality which is also part of the coding aspect of computers based on the zero and one.  The title of the work is a palindrome and indicates both a play and a blurring between the notions of past and future. But at the same time, what we really see, it’s literally, again, this contrast between desert and water, elements that are very diverse and very opposite, yet at the same time interdependent. The sound that we hear is a combination of a sound recreated from dinosaurs and outer space vibration.  And they're kind of all connected to what was in this place, what was this, is almost a soundscape of pre-human existence. So Himali, in this way, brings us out of here, into another in the outer world, by almost traveling back in time,  not only in space. 

 

Daniela Ruiz Moreno:

 

I would just add that all this, the creation of this video, and as well the sound which is very important, we have placed the sound through these two headsets. It's all possible to do through technological reimagining. Himali uses technology to present how we think the past looked and sounded. So this is again, with this whole exhibition, we also wanted to present a game or yet an articulation with different times, not only thinking about the abstraction of the future but as well of the past. And how art can be a vehicle to present that.