In the summer of 2026, I placed ten coconut-fiber planters across Chicago, each filled with store-bought soil and no seeds. An AI system I had helped design selected eight of the locations. I chose one myself and kept the last planter in my downtown studio as a control. For 37 days I was allowed to visit but not to intervene. Before each visit I recorded what I expected to find; afterward, what I found.

Some planters disappeared. In others, something grew. As I drove across the city to check on them, I found myself drawn to certain sites and reluctant to return to others. The rules were mine, but I became less sure of what bound me to them.

The records began to fill with things that had nothing to do with the planters. It was my first return to the Midwest in ten years.

Guest Soil takes its title from 客土, a construction term for soil brought in from elsewhere. This work gathers what came back from these visits, and what did not, into an artist’s book and an installation.

I recorded the trains passing outside my studio in Chicago and had a waveform from the recording tattooed onto my left arm.

I drew up a deed offering the tattoo to the Chicago Transit Authority, attributed to the section of elevated track that produced the sound. The deed proposes two endings: if the railway stops running first, I will have the tattoo removed. If I die first, I ask that the tattooed skin be offered to the CTA.

The sound had entered my room without asking. I wrote a letter explaining that I wanted to give it back. The deed, letter, and photographs are displayed together. The tattoo remains on my arm.

Co-curated with Mushi Wooseong James, Creative Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, between membranes brought audiences on a walk through Djerassi’s landscape. Sound, installation, and live performance gave each stop a different way of attending to its surroundings.

The program approached a membrane as a threshold through which bodies, sounds, and histories meet. Architecture, skin, and the edges between indoors and outdoors became places to consider what passes through, what is held back, and how we are changed by contact.

Walking between the works was part of the experience. Attention moved between the performances, other listeners, and the life of the landscape, carrying something of each encounter into the next.

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