Touch Kiss Bind

2021
Dimensions variable

Invisible Connection: Touch Kiss Bind is a microbial art installation developed in and around Chuangzhi Community Garden in Shanghai. The community garden offers a small urban ecological space where residents, volunteers, plants, food, soil, and compost continuously interact. The project examines this community from a microbial perspective, asking how human and plant bodies are materially connected through exchanges that usually remain invisible.

The project consists of three parts. TOUCH cultivates microorganisms collected from human hands and plant leaves, tracing microbial exchange through planting, tending, and everyday contact. KISS combines samples from human lips and edible fruits and vegetables, focusing on the transfer that occurs through eating. BIND brings together microorganisms from community compost and plant rhizospheres, following a longer cycle in which materials from human bodies return to soil and are incorporated into plant life.

By culturing these samples together, the work makes otherwise imperceptible forms of contact visible and treats the community as an ecology extending across human, vegetal, and microbial bodies. After the exhibition, the living installations were relocated to Chuangzhi Community Garden, where they continued to grow and transform over time to become both records and participants in the relationships they sought to reveal.