Mariko HORI
Sitting in the Same Soup
Sound installation
second- and third-generation supermarket vegetables, soil, fabric, tiles, different flooring materials, and soup ladles
2026
Sitting in the Same Soup explores happiness and belonging through migration and adaptation in both humans and vegetables. The title comes from a Dutch expression in which ingredients in soup are described as “sitting” rather than floating or swimming.
Carrots, onions, celery, tomatoes, potatoes, leeks, parsley, and garlic all originate from different lands, moving and adapting over long histories before becoming part of what is now considered a “local taste.” Imagine traditional Dutch groentesoep. Within the pot, they coexist without hierarchy, releasing their individual qualities while contributing to a collective whole.
This image becomes a metaphor for society, where difference does not disappear but remains present within a shared space. At the same time, it quietly unsettles a human-centred perspective: while vegetables appear to be cultivated, transported, and domesticated by humans, their persistence suggests another reading—one in which they have drawn humans into their cycles of care, cultivation, and desire.
Through conversations with migrants in the Netherlands, the project listens to memories carried through food, taste, and everyday gestures. Vegetables, too, hold trajectories of displacement and adaptation, moving across climates, technologies, and generations. By placing these presences in parallel, the work approaches happiness not as a fixed state, but as something that emerges through relation—formed through the slow acceptance of sitting together in the same uncertain ground.
The installation takes the form of a soft seating landscape made of soil, where visitors sit together with second- and third-generation supermarket vegetable plants, while listening to the plants’ whispering. Beneath the soil seating, everyday floor materials—wood flooring, carpet, tatami, linoleum, and other surfaces evoking different domestic and cultural environments—are layered. Small white tiles, inspired by Delft Blue in their colour, rest on these floors. Instead of glazed ornament, they are drawn on by hand in blue pen, carrying images of vegetables, fragments of migration histories, and the words of the vegetables, imagined from their own histories.
Group Exhibition
Host(ile) Lands
19 April – 14 June 2026
zone2source, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
All content © Mariko Hori 2026