What if we could compost the multiple lives within our single lifetime to grow a world?
Fruiting Bodies is an artist-led speculation about temporality and the afterlife inspired by regenerative decay of fungi. Using sound and mycelium as a medium of inquiry, this project explores temporality and ecology with members of the transgender and gender diverse communities.
Speculative thinking is a way of practicing our futures in the now. Together, as the authors of our own archives for the future, the project participants delve into questions around how we want to be remembered and speculate who we can be in life and in the afterlife.
As complex, storied individuals, trans people have already lived multiple lives by now. We embody multiple temporalities — bodily, hormonal, and generational – at once. We have the right to self-determine our afterlives. Making afterlife decisions is an act of self affirmation, a reinforcement of our chosen kinship structure, and an amplification of the feeling of belonging.
What does our afterlife look or sound like? How does our thinking around the afterlife influence our choices and our sense of self today? When done collectively, memory making for the future can help alleviate fears of erasure posed by the anti-trans attacks on gender affirming care, performance, sports, and public accommodations.
With a goal toward transformative healing, this project offers provocations beyond the current memory-keeping institutions. In anticipation of Transgender Day of Remembrance this year, I invite members of the transgender and gender diverse community to participate in the making of speculative oral history recordings of their lives and afterlives.
Through a series of one-on-one oral history interviews and group workshops, Fruiting Bodies provides the space for a collective, multigenerational contemplation on how we want to be remembered in terms of the following: name, legacy, physical remains, narrative, relationships, kinships, and objects.
On November 9, 2025, I curated Fruiting Bodies: A Multisensory Workshop at the West Hollywood Library. I presented their speculative fungi music project Fruiting Bodies, including a sound installation prototype with living fungi and oral history recordings. Through writing and visual prompts, participants recorded their visions of a universe based on their own memories, language, stories, dreams, experiences, and relationship to loved ones.
Workshop participants learned about mushrooms and deep time from author and conservation mycologist Aaron Tupac. Somatics facilitator and coach Hia Phua guided an embodiment session inspired by mycological life to support further contemplation and healing.
I am working toward the development of a sound installation with living fungi and oral history recordings to be included in an exhibition in Los Angeles in Fall 2026.
Fruiting Bodies is supported partially by grants from the City of West Hollywood and Community Engagement.