Sonic Inheritance, 2026

2026 Sound Scene, the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Sonic Inheritance is a wearable organ sculpture containing seven internal tumors, each translating their genetic portrait into sound through field recordings, Geofón-captured movements, and contact-mic improvisations. I am is prone to developing tumors; my genes misspell my DNA the way I sometimes misspells words, shaping a new body, a mutation, a different language written into me. The work asks how we come to know our internal worlds, the parts that slip, gurgle, and work in silence, and whether what the body makes from within can be heard, felt, and held rather than feared. Try on the organ-body: hold it in your hands, place it over your head, and listen through your own body to what your inside sounds like.