Legal and commercial stamps are impressed partly by steam-presses located in the basement and partly by hand in rooms on the ground floor… The pedestrian on the Victoria Embankment who notes the clatter of mechanism behind the barred windows under the terrace of Somerset House is listening to the process by which the State makes paper into gold. - Needham, R., Somerset House, Past and Present, London: 1906, p. 257
In the performance ‘The Things That Pass Through’, Hylozoic/Desires (H/D) address the invisible exchanges, repurposings and entanglements that one ran, and continue to ripple across the physical and intangible dividing lines imposed by Empire.
Referencing the sonic history of Somerset House, H/D propose a rhythmic dialogue mimicking the incessant noise of stamps that once echoed its hallways and stairwells. Percussionists Sarathy Korwar and David Soin Tappeser will take over the building’s central Stamp Stairs. Unable to see each other, while occupying varying levels in its architectural hierarchy, they will engage in a ‘jugalbandhi’, a musical exchange of messages that - like the ideas, salt and stones that, picked up from the land, crossed the ‘Great Salt Hedge of India’, and became of the land - defy borders, divisions and separations. In doing this, they form new logics of argumentation and play.