Imagining the future through mycelium
For Brazilian-born, Philippines-based artist Ciane Xavier-Calma, transformation is not an abstract concept she throws around in her art. Besides being the backbone of her artistic practice, it used to define her own lived history, as a model whose life was shaped by constant migration.
Long before she began sculpting suspended heads out of clay or engineering animatronic gestures that blink and breathe, she lived a life where identity was constantly renegotiated across borders. “I’ve migrated to many countries many times throughout my life. Each place gave me a new layer, a new voice, a new loss, a new beginning,” she reflects.
Her latest installation “Sanctuary of Becoming” was made in collaboration with Homeqube and presented in PMQ in Hong Kong, a well-known historical building transformed into a mixed-use arts and design venue.
Part shelter, part altar, and part emotional laboratory, the immersive work gathered layers of life into one living environment. Built with mycelium components, the vegetative root part of a fungus, it turned the process of becoming into something you walk through and witness physically, bringing visible form to time, decay, and growth.
Entities with emotions
Suspended from the ceiling are ceramic heads, each expressing a distinct emotion—some smile, some close their eyes in calm, and others seem on the verge of tears.
Her earlier sculptures have featured these alabaster-skinned characters, some with rabbit ears, others with exaggerated limbs and blotchy joints, in almost clinical interpretations of the body. She once described her work as “about loss of identity. They are more like entities, somewhere else.”
In “Sanctuary of Becoming”, those entities find new forms. Grief, wonder, restraint, and longing are now distilled into ceramic faces. Among them hangs a single animatronic head, nearly indistinguishable from the still ones until it moves with a blink or subtle tilt. This engineering blurs distinctions between simulated and human emotion.
Xavier explains that the work began with a simple question: What happens to us when we change too many times? Who do we become along the way? She continues, “This work became a place to hold all those fragments of identity and emotion… a space where all these versions could finally coexist…. a sanctuary where transformation, vulnerability, and the quiet work of becoming are visible and held with care.”
“This work gives physical form to something we all experience but rarely articulate: the messy, beautiful attempt to transform,” Xavier expresses. “I wanted to create a space that holds emotional complexity, where every fragment of a person, the brave ones, the wounded ones, the half-formed ones, can coexist without fear.”
Living architecture
Mycelium served as both material and metaphor for “Sanctuary of Becoming. “The work is a prototype of future sanctuaries,” Xavier explains. “A place where nature, technology, and emotion live together. Mycelium became the perfect material for that metaphor: alive, growing, dying, reforming, just how identity is shaped.”
Her collaboration with Homeqube grounded this vision in structure. “Homeqube helped shape ‘Sanctuary of Becoming’ by giving the project a structural spine, a system architecture that let my idea grow from a sculpture into a living environment.”
Their modular, no cement approach aligned with her desire to build something that feels ancient yet futuristic, a space that behaves more like a living organism than an inert installation.
Toward softer futures
Visitors in Hong Kong moved through the suspended heads, looking up at shifting sightlines. The installation does not instruct or direct but instead offers something gentler. “I hope visitors leave with a sense of permission, permission to feel, to change, to become,” she says.
“Sanctuary of Becoming” merges craft, material intelligence, and speculative design into one contemplative environment. It also gestures toward the future. “In my own future speculation, this installation is a prototype, an early model of the sanctuaries I imagine us building, building with nature, not against it,” she says. “A future where design doesn’t dominate the environment but heals it. Where we don’t just erect structures, but create spaces that support nature and heal societies.”
If the installation offers viewers even a moment of softness, she considers it complete. “If visitors feel even a small spark of that future, a soft recognition that becoming is sacred, and that the world we build can be softer too, then the work has done what it needed to do.”
In a city as fast and vertical as Hong Kong, “Sanctuary of Becoming” is like a countercurrent, in a space where transformation is felt not through spectacle but stillness. The work acts like a reminder that identity, much like mycelium—grows, dies, and reforms, in an installation that offers every version of the self a place to both express and rest.
Xavier extends her long-running inquiry into identity and material transformation into an architectural scale, creating an emotionally grounded, tactile environment. For an artist shaped by movement and reinvention, it feels both like a culmination and a beginning, pointing toward new ways of imagining how humans dwell, feel, and ultimately, change.
“Sanctuary of Becoming” ran from Nov. 28 to Dec. 7 at deTour 2025, PMQ, Central, Hong Kong
