STONE SOUP is a communal gathering around stone, mineral, charcoal, and rubble as active material archives. Through experimental improvisation, artists Dima Mabsout and Tyler Rai, bring their practices together, weaving ritual, story, sound, and soup-making into a collaborative space with members of the Indexical community. Utilizing loop pedals, contact microphones, transducers, and mortar and pestles, the artists transmute lithic matter into a haptic experience of mineral and bodily transformation. The piece takes the form of a 3-part ritual where sediment becomes sound and minerals nourish the bones. A space for digestion, for nourishment, for renewal.

***Soup will served after the performance. We will provide a small number of bowls and utensils, but audiences are encourage to bring their own bowl.**

Dima Mabsout is a multidisciplinary, Lebanese artist working in photo, social performance, installation, and material processes, currently based in Santa Cruz. In Lebanon, between 2019-2023, during the uprising, economic collapse, port explosion and pandemic, the crises formed the creative imperative to uplift the imagination and reclaim collective narratives. There, she co-founded Zayraqoun, a collective centered around street theatre that collaborated with educational, cultural and political sectors. She taught at Horshna, the first community-organized forest school, and worked with Catalytic Action, directing the Kan Ya Makana program that received a Thornton Education Trust Award in 2023. She started her land-based research with the Museum for the Displaced, exhibiting at the Municipal Gallery of Almada, Portugal and joined the Environmental Art and Social Practice Program at UC Santa Cruz to deepen and diversify her approaches to community actions and social movements that center land and ecology. Since then, she has been an active member of the Greenhouse Project Collective, published in KERB 32: Unsaid, and initiated Limbs with her partner Rami Chahine, a community art project that exhibited at Indexical and Bread and Puppet Theatre in 2025.

Working across the fields of geo-humanities, visual art, and performance, Tyler Rai investigates processes of earthly transformation. Through material studies of stones, sediments, and soil, her research draws connections between human and geologic embodiments, ancestral memory, and ecological attention. Her installations and performance works have been shown nationally across the U.S, most recently alongside artists Athena LaTocha and Mary Mattingly in To See This Place: Awakening to Our Common Home at The Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MI) and the Fairfield University Art Museum (CT). Current collaborations include the intra-disciplinary collective, Glacial Hauntologies (2020-ongoing), a collaboration between glaciologists and artists conducting research on Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, as well as the Seed Protection Program with the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (2024-ongoing). She received her BA in Dance and Community Studies from Bennington College and is currently an MFA candidate in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UC Santa Cruz.