Himali Singh Soin

Welcome to A Portrait of Progress, a series that sees seven changemakers come together to create one inspiring collective. A collective united by one goal, protecting our planet and those who inhabit it.

Please introduce yourself.
Hi, I’m Himali Singh Soin. I’m an artist and a poet, and I live between London and Delhi. My work revolves around ecological themes of glaciers, mountains, plants, birds. Mostly, I use the natural world as a metaphor to think about the human condition—love, death, dreaming, wayfinding. 

What moves you?
The main thing that moves me is joy. I love finding joy in everything I do. It’s what keeps me coming back to rowing. It’s what brings me back to medicine, and it’s what draws me to the rivers in the UK.

What does Earth positive mean to you?
Earth positive to me feels like, firstly, not creating words that distance us (like “Earth” and “positive”) from ourselves, as though the Earth is something outside of us. It’s about thinking of the Earth as fully integrated within our lives, and taking care of it as it takes care of us. 

What moves you?
What moves me, maybe, is the bigness of the world itself. I mean, every day I have a moment where I look at the moon and exclaim at it. I think that means what moves me is attentiveness, observing the little particles that make up the huge cosmos.

What advice would you tell your younger self?
The things that were your instinct, the things you mistrusted, trust those things. Trust the oddities about yourself, the eccentricities of your being. The things you thought “no one’s going to believe this” or the things people told you were too much, those are actually your strengths. The exception is your rule.

How did your journey begin?
My journey began, I guess, with my parents, who are explorers by profession. They climbed mountains and travelled the world. I was literally in a harness, swinging from giant lilies and trekking in massive mountainous landscapes, sailing oceans and foraging in forests, traversing deserts and steppes on camels and horses. We kind of lived with the land. There was a constant sense of adventure, curiosity, and wonder.

We’re spotlighting seven changemakers across disciplines all contributing to creating an Earth Positive Future. What does the number seven mean to you?
I’ve just returned from Australia, my seventh continent. And if I have to think of seven, I think of the seven continents. I’m actually working on a piece about Pangaea right now. It involves audiences sitting in a hammock above a performance. There’s a huge quantity of sand on the ground, and two performers move the sand to form the shape of Pangaea. 

Pangaea then transforms into the current map of the world. And then that map shifts again—into a speculative future Pangaea, a kind of depiction of a post-human world, after climate change has made the planet uninhabitable for humans. It still looks like Pangaea, but kind of melted. 

The idea is to bring ourselves out of literal thinking, to locate ourselves into the logic of the lands we particularly inhabit, and imagine ourselves instead as just a blip in geological time. To propose indigeneity and alienness as two dots on the same tectonic line.

What grounds you?
I have this theory, the anchor theory let's call it. I go on boats quite often, crossing seas and oceans. When I travelled to the Antarctic and the Arctic, I had to go on these ships that can’t anchor too close to shore. The anchor has to drop in the middle of the ocean. Then, the ship just gently pivots around that axis, much like the planet itself. 

So, the idea of being grounded, the theory is that your anchor is not stationary or fixed—but must necessarily float. You have to, exactly where that anchor drops for you. It can’t be too close to land, and it can’t be too deep in the water either.