Civic Ecologies January 2026
does your belly hurt yet? is a post-meal table installation turning Berlin's perpetual state of becoming into in a material invitation for collective digestion.
The final installation at Dock11, amplified for demo
The final installation at Dock11, amplified for demo
Visitors sit at a post-meal table where bass shakers embedded in the dining setup vibrate with low register audio from Berlin's waste management system: 3.1 million digestive processes compressed into sub-audible hum. Leaning into the table, you can feel and hear my own digestion emitted through transducers attached to the wood.
The modern city and media landscape demands constant ingestion and we too often assume our interactions with each other are done fully formed. This piece interrupts isolated processing by literalizing digestion as a shared condition.
Silent to outsiders, the work is only revealed through sitting, leaning, and staying.
Let me amplify my gut feelings.
Berlin is a city of constant becoming, shaped by histories far and recent: culturally, physically, ecologically. As a temporary visitor, embedding into the city became its own experience of processing and becoming.
In our Civic Ecologies class, we were called to see the city as systems and relationships. Already excited about cities, I wanted to also comment on my own experience here while respecting what I don't yet know as a non-Berliner.
Unidentified foam at the wastewater treatment
Unidentified foam at the wastewater treatment
During our tour of the waste management facility, after walking through 7 stages of filtering to meet with the remaining (horribly smelling) sludge, the guide offered up a quote that stuck with me, for better or for worse: "If you put your mouth around the sludge tube, you are getting a direct connection to the buttholes of all 3.1 million Berliners."
The visceral statement collapsed the individual and collective, and the gross intimacy of shared infrastructure became the seed for this work.
We are always ingesting: not just food, but news, political shifts, cultural upheaval, information we can barely metabolize before we ingest the next. Do we know when we're digesting? Do we know what others are processing? I wanted to propose an installation that listens to guttural feelings, that forces you to digest with me together, and sit with the discomfort of transformation.
As part of the curriculum of the city, my two weeks in Berlin was filled with listening: at field trips, tours, listening bars, clubs, symphonies. I wanted to tune into the frequencies of the city I loved.
But as someone uncomfortable with making audio (I've never touched music production software, I struggle to hear in loud rooms, my voice doesn't travel) I found myself feeling more connected to haptics and vibrations within these listening scenes.
When building the installation. I had originally thought about a large, translucent, huggable sculpture.
I realized I was subconsciously inspired by Julie Freeman, who I've been honored to have as a mentor this past year. She translates data into sculptures using molded plywood to create seating or laying structures that play audio through transducers. Julie's work showed me a springboard to make sound tactile, to make invisible processing felt.
But the more I sketched out this sculpture idea, the less I found the form to speak to my experience of Berlin. I was embedding myself into an existing landscape, not creating a brand new one.
I've been circling the digestive system and eating experiences as metaphors for other types of consumption, and this was no exception.
Going through my camera roll mid flight to Berlin, I found this image by photographer Karman Verdi in his project Ghost has stayed in my inspiration board for years.
His partner is projected onto an empty dining chair during the pandemic, rendering visible the lost intimacy of shared meals in this distanced time. That collapse of presence and absence at the table felt like it named something essential about eating together as closeness.
I wanted to visit this dining interaction.
I also had the pleasure of seeing We should have as many voices interspersing as possible by elekhlekha at NEW INC last year. This was a multichannel installation using small plastic stools embedded with speakers, distributing Southeast Asian melodies and rhythms across each seat in hypnotic hocketing patterns. Experiencing it seated in ensemble with others, the work became collective and haptic. That sense of being part of a sonic body stuck with me.
Elekhlekha at NEW INC Demo 2024