2022-2025

Commissioned by Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, and House of Humor, Gabrovo, Bulgaria.

Presented at Hard Return (2023), Neuberger Museum of Art, curated by SUNY Purchase professors Kate Gilmore and Jonah Westerman; and Sensitivity Training (2022), House of Humor, Gabrovo, Bulgaria, curated by Olav Westfalen.

In May 2021 Elon Musk, the founder of Space X, tweeted my work “Darth Vader Tries to Clean the Black Sea with a Brita Filter” (2000). Cosmic Cucumber Carousel is the artist’s response. Since then, it has grown into a multi-disciplinary project, triggering debates about the future of space travel and human relationships to all the non-human factors that make life possible. 

Musk boasts that the SpaceX Mars mission will establish a colony of one million people on Mars by the year 2050. Cosmic Cucumber Carousel is following developments with the proposal to grow cucumbers on Mars to help feed the population. The piece takes the form of an opera in its expanded sense of work, labor, care, and trouble. 

I collaborated with the composer and vocalist Erin Gee to create a five-day-long opera that folds a year’s work with Nela Rachevitz, Galina Ivanova, Anna Balanska, and other gardeners in Bulgaria; the soil biogeochemist Professor Johannes Lehman, the astro-ecologist Morgan Irons at the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University, and the plant scientist Margaret Ball at The Soil Factory in Ithaca, New York.

A cycle of videos features Gee and I as cantors, speculating on the viability of life on this and other planets. Live singers performed a one-minute composition by Erin Gee on the hour, wearing garments designed by me and the fashion designer Kiwi Nguyen. Scientists, fortune tellers and gardeners made disparate predictions against a backdrop of fresco panels and pickled cucumbers, experimentally grown in Mars Regolith Simulant. Custom-made glass pickling jars were created in collaboration with Adam Kennedy at the Chemistry Department Glass Shop, UT at Austin, Texas. 

Embroiderers continued to work on the curtain during the five-day opera, and some enthusiastic visitors also joined in. The curtain creates a visual and chronological log of the project in fabric photographs with embroidered titles and captions describing the actions, plus embroidered blocks of scores for the music, and other connecting links. 

Recent interest in human habitation of other planets raises questions not only about the viability of extraterrestrial agriculture, but also about what exactly humans require to survive, maintain civilization, culture, and an “adequate” quality of life. The work asks us to envision variable futures and how actions in the present make some versions more possible than others.

Materials & Actions:

Three cucumber gardens established and cultivated in Bulgaria and New York State; cucumbers successfully grown in Mars Regolith Simulant in Ithaca, New York, and pickled cucumbers in custom-made glass jars; 

frescoes on panels; custom made garments; embroidered curtain 9x36ft.

Musical composition and video performance with vocalist and composer Erin Gee;

live vocal performances by students from SUNY Purchase, New York

Garden locations:

House of Humor, Gabrovo, Bulgaria

Nyack, New York

School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

The Soil Factory, Ithaca, New York