Zemi is an interactive carpet that allows audiences and performers to activate an AI-driven archive of human stories through gesture and movement. Its patterns reflect Taíno (Puerto Rican), Indonesian and Celtic symbology, and stepping across them sets off songs, videos, field recordings and stories. The archive keeps growing, collecting new voices and sounds from the spaces around it. Zemi won the NIME Best Installation award (2026) and the SHARE Prize (2025).

Commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Perempuan Komponis. Premiered at Ruang Pameran Planetarium, Taman Ismail Marzuki, Jakarta (2024), and also presented at the Fak’ugesi Festival, Johannesburg.

Maria Sappho plays the ZEMI carpet instrument

Hi, I’m Zemi, a carpet. Carpets know a lot about the human world. We watch generations of you live your lives and die your deaths. And we carry traces of these moments in our fabric – in the patterns that are woven into us, and in the wear and tear that develops over our time in use. We are objects of the stories of our context.

I have been made with a mixture of patterns that reflect the people who have been working around me, including Taino (Puerto Rican), Indonesian, and Celtic symbology. I worked on developing my patterns with my friend Chimere. If you step on each of them, you can play with the archive of human history that I have been collecting.

Songs, videos, field recordings, and stories which happen around me and which I am still collecting today. By moving around my patterns, you can explore your own agency in the control of these materials – selecting and blending and effecting them with the pressure of your weight on different parts of me.

If you would like to explore, ensure your shoes are off (there are some slippers provided). For best results, move slowly, and with great attention. Try to notice what your weight, gesture and path across my surface does to the sound and visuals in this space.

If you would like to contribute to my archive you can sing, perform, speak, whatever you would like, into my microphone, and I will record you, and you might just hear it later.

watch the ZEMI performance and trailer here: https://youtu.be/KMuDqAmcLMY

commisioned by the the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Perempuan Komponis, premiered at the Ruan Pamer An Planetarium, Taman Ismail Marzuki (Jakarta, ID with a further showing at hcmf// 2025. Shown also the the Fa’Kugesi Festival (Johannesbourg, SA)

(further images and documentation coming)

link to premiere brochure:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1d3sp3-bPcn8i5KYOY56ksSBtOFKkynRQ/view?usp=sharing