static range (2020 - ongoing)

Static Range is a multi-disciplinary and multi-limbed project using a real-life spy-story in the Indian Himalayas as a canvas 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.

The project is accompanied by a collaboration with the NGO, Live to Love, to raise funds for the aid and survival of communities across the Himalayas, from Kashmir to the Kumaon.

Nanda Devi, meaning the goddess of happiness, is the patron mountain of the Indian Himalayas. During the cold war in 1965, the CIA collaborated with the Indian Intelligence Bureau to site a nuclear-powered surveillance device on the mountain to intercept Chinese nuclear missile data. The mountain goddess, a temperamental revolutionary, whipped up an immense tempest, and the expedition had to turn back. The plutonium powered device was stashed on the mountain with the intention of recovering it the following season, however it has yet to be found, and “could still be ticking somewhere”. 

Since 1965, the plutonium-powered generator, half the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, has been leaking radioactivity into the mountain, creating glimmering blue ice caves. Mysterious cases of cancer abound in the Sherpa communities of the surrounding villages, and the mountain has since been closed to subsequent expeditions. 

In 1978, during the few years the sanctuary was reopened, my father, a mountaineer, went on an expedition to climb Kalanka. From there, they took a photograph of Nanda Devi, which was made into a national postage stamp.

Using the conceit of the stamp, static range begins with a toxic love-letter from the spy device to the mountain.

Conflating these public and personal histories, a 15-minute animation of the image of the postage stamp morphs as if it were subjected to radiation, resplendent in the nuclear sublime. The word “India” disappears, erasing the nation state and its obliterating violences, drawing attention to blank stamps and letters that never reach those across zones of conflict. Loves lost or never requited.

Static Range (2021)

Video animation, color, sound; 15 min loop. Soundscape by David Soin Tappeser

In 1965 the CIA and the Indian Intelligence Bureau together plotted to intercept Chinese nuclear mis- sile 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 neigh- boring communities.

In 1988 the mountain appeared on a national stamp, and its image proliferated around the world. Soin’s video is a love letter from the spy device to the mountain. Recounting what it has seen, it rumi- nates 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.

An Affirmation (2022)

Video, color, sound; 15 min. loop Soundscape by David Soin Tappeser

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.” Soin 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 ef- fects of radioactivity begin to glitch the landscape. A healer places her hands on the artist, who becomes a conduit, and makes signs, as if at- tempting to send long-term warning messages. She sends beams of energy to the glacial lake

Wast Water, which feeds the nuclear site. Land- scapes 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 ac- companying soundscape consists of recordings of choirs performing near 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.”

THE TOXIC LOVE LETTER FROM THE SPY DEVICE TO THE MOUNTAIN AND THE MOUNTAIN’S RESPONSE

THE MUSIC

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 (home of the area that to which the device was meant to have an “unobstructed view”). 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. 

Nanda Devi I (2020)

Artist Jordan Nassar explores ideas of home, her- itage, and identity through Palestinian craft tech- niques, often working with local artisans. In this spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing, Soin invited Nassar to respond to her video Static Range. Inspired by the image of Nanda Devi, Nassar—whose work often depicts harmonious landscapes in contested territories—embroidered the mountain. In Nanda Devi I, Nassar employed a Palestinian motif that shares pat- terns and forms with the Himalayan Panchachuli (five peaks) weave, using threads to connect two cultural traditions that are spiritually anchored to land and that persist across borders.

Nassar’s abstracted landscape recalls stills from Soin’s video, further distorting the mountain—piercing it and overlaying an intricate geometry that dissolves any topo- graphical contours. Framed, the embroidered image engages a tradition of landscape painting while its stitches and pattern evoke pixels, conjuring the moun- tain’s circulation through a network of media.

Body of Light (2022)

Glazed porcelain

Energy healer, media anthropologist and my Himalayan neighbour, Viveka Chauhan will utilize the aural colors of the mountain, formed both by the image exposed to radiation as well as the mountain’s own century-old wisdom, to send it long-distance healing. 

Using sound wave healing and embalming the poetry, she will use the variety of media created from the project to receive its layers of transmissions and operate upon them. The voice (powered by the throat and heart chakra) when chanting or reciting verse or poetry have a compounding effect on the healing being sent. Many traditional and modern energy healing systems rely on sound waves to disperse stuck or toxic energies in the aura of a person or entity. In this way the Nagada drums along with the recitation of poetry can be used to dispel some of the toxicity caused by radioactive waves. 

She would cut the chords of radiation and the parasitic energies that have been draining the mountain, while clearing its aura and revitalizing its energy, tapping into the omnipresent wisdom that has existed since the mountain was part of the ocean floor. Cutting chords is a way of weeding out any sources of energy that have attached themselves to a human or nonhuman life form. This is followed by an embalming of energy that helps to restore a natural energy flow.

With the help of local botanists, we plant bioremedic garden everywhere that Static Range tours, comprising of a variety of species that absorb radiation.

INSTALL VIEWS

THE STAMP BOOKLET

The book, Static Range, takes its inspiration from stamp booklets and flip books: it forms an analogue version of the eponymous animation in which the mountain, Nanda Devi, morphs in the nuclear sublime, radiant and blemished. Made with organic cellulose paper and entirely lickable, each page contains four perforated stamps. It is held by a screen printed cover on cloth, and a wrapper containing an epistolary exchange between the mountain and the nuclear powered spy device that is lodged inside it, as well as three newly commissioned texts. Necessarily, the only way to consume this book is to destroy it.

LONG-TIME WARNING MESSAGES

ESSAYS

In progress from the Marshall Islands…

CAST OF COLLABORATORS

Production

Mandip Singh Soin for the first photograph

Anita Singh Soin for planting a garden in the Himalayas 

David Soin Tappeser for the music

Jordan Nasser for the embroidered mountain 

Viveka Chauhan for sending long distance energy healing to the mountain 

Charly Blackburn for producing the ceramic 

Rose Nordin and Lakshita Munjal for the illustrations in the nuclear script

Tiziana Mangiaratti for animating the landscape 

MJ Harding and the Black Shuck Coop for sound recording and mastering

Lucia Pietroiusti, Kostas Stasinopoulos and Holly Shuttleworth, for launching the many transmissions

Ivan L. Munuera and Andrea Bagnato for the language of vulnerability 

Research

Ele Carpenter for the guidance on nuclear photography culture 

Jahnavi Phalkey for the guidance on nuclear anthropology

Rachel Harris for the ethnomusicological research of Uyghur music 

Sudama Lal Tamta for fabricating the nagada drums 

Suresh Bisht for his help on-site in the Himalayas

The Copeland Borough Council for the site visit to Sellafield 

Publication

Sukanya Ghosh for designing the stamp booklet

Irene Sunwoo, Kostas Stasinopoulos, Lola Mac Dougall for the stamp booklet essays

Translations (Static Range)

Shveta Sarda for the Hindi translation 

Ulrike Almut Sandig for the German translation 

Muna Abu Baker for the Arabic translation

Shahar Kramer for the Hebrew translation 

Jeremy Victor Robert with inputs from Eugénie Paultre for the French translation

Maat Museum Portuguese translation 

Casa Encendida and Ivan L. Manuera Spanish translation 

ShinWoo Kang for the Korean translation

Thanks to the support of:

Serpentine, Prince Claus Fund, EWERK, The Art Institute of Chicago, Graham Foundation, HKW and WePresent