The first impulse for between membranes came from being moved by Aine E. Nakamura’s performance hands on tape. When I shared the idea with her, the word I reached for was “roofless.”

Co-curated with Mushi Wooseong James, Creative Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, between membranes took shape as a walk through Djerassi’s landscape, gathering sound, installation, and live performance along the way. At each stop, we paused together. The works met the air, the ground, and whatever else was already there.

A membrane offered us a way to think about this contact: skin, a wall, the edge of a room. Something passes through; something is held back. Bodies, sounds, and histories arrive with their own boundaries, which do not always stay where we expect them to. Between the works, we kept walking. A sound or a gesture could linger while our attention drifted toward another listener, or toward something moving in the landscape. There was room for what we had just encountered to follow us.

After years of rising costs pressing on San Francisco’s art scene, sustaining a local arts community also meant making time to be together. Here, in the hills above Silicon Valley, our response to the rise of AI centered on the membrane: a boundary that helps constitute who we are, yet can itself be changed through contact. Listening, moving, and spending time together became ways to explore how encounters might transform the boundaries through which we recognize ourselves and one another, bringing forms of relation into being that our existing categories cannot yet describe.

Featuring Li Yilei, Aine E. Nakamura, Alex H Nichols, Jorge Bachmann, and Barbara Nerness.
Photographs courtesy of event participants and photographer Sophie Dezhao Jin.