Coachella art installation: 'Once you become a hippo, nothing looks the same again'

The 'H.i.P.O.' art installation at the 2019 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. Photo: AP

I’m inside a circular facade with three people pulling hard on a flight suit and rubber mask to set me up to enter a makeshift control room on the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival field (in Indio, California, the United States) where I’ll play a very frustrating version of Simon Says while fest-goers gawk from the field.

It’s one of the oddest (and most confounding) gigs on the Coachella field: I’m a hippo in a 23m tall sculpture known as H.i.P.O. (which stands for Hazardous Interstellar Professional Operations), which looks like a space shuttle strapped together with tape and not much else.