About us

Helium is an interdisciplinary artistic collective working at the intersection of sound, perception, and immaterial infrastructures. The collective investigates how bodies, technologies, and environments interact through invisible forces such as vibration, frequency, data, and sensory feedback, developing immersive installations and performative environments where perception becomes a site of research.

Helium is co-founded by Ludovica Giacomini Corponi (working under the artistic name Minima), researcher, curator, and multimedia producer, and Youssef DaLima, filmmaker and visual artist. Their practices converge around a shared investigation into embodied experience, technological mediation, and the continuity between natural and artificial systems.

Under the artistic identity Minima, Ludovica Giacomini Corponi brings a research-driven perspective grounded in Human–Machine Interaction (HMI), embodiment, and sensory experience. With an academic background spanning visual arts, digital communication, and social research, her practice focuses on immersive systems as cognitive, affective, and relational devices. Within Helium, she investigates how audiovisual and biometric technologies mediate affect, agency, and perception, positioning the spectator as an embodied participant rather than a passive observer.

Youssef DaLima’s background in cinema, photography, and immersive media informs Helium’s spatial and narrative approach. Trained in visual storytelling and largely self-taught through experimentation and advanced mentorship, his work expands cinematic language toward performative, site-sensitive, and installation-based forms. Within Helium, he explores sound as a spatial and relational medium—ephemeral, invasive, and capable of revealing forms of presence, contamination, and transformation that remain visually imperceptible.

Together, their research unfolds through installations realized in medical, scientific, theatrical, and environmental contexts. Helium’s works are conceived as experimental ecosystems where sound, space, and technology interact dynamically, implicating human presence as an active force within the environment. Rather than producing representations or closed narratives, the collective constructs perceptual situations that expose tensions between nature and culture, visibility and invisibility, control and emergence.

Helium rejects the idea of nature as a neutral or restorative backdrop, instead revealing the persistence of human-made systems—urban, technological, infrastructural—even within non-urban spaces. Sound operates as a key vehicle of this inquiry: invisible yet invasive, it propagates, resonates, and inhabits space, making perceptible the continuity between organic and artificial environments.

Operating at the intersection of artistic practice and theoretical inquiry, Helium positions immersive systems as tools for sensing complexity rather than resolving it, using sound and perception as instruments to explore contemporary human–environment relations.