The Place of Dwelling

When artist and educator Edra Soto took the stage at Deem Journal’s Designing for Dignity 03: A Convening of Possibilities symposium, she spoke in Spanish. That choice immediately reframed the room. Her words, both poetic and deliberate, created an architecture—a dwelling—for ideas about belonging, migration, and love.

Edra Soto presents at Deem Journal’s Designing for Dignity 03: A Convening of Possibilities at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Photo: Leah Ray

Building from Heritage

Soto’s Puerto Rican heritage anchors her practice, from the decorative patterns that trace the façades of working-class homes to the collaborative installations that open her own backyard to Chicago’s creative communities. She described these motifs not as ornament, but as “decorative language,” a system of meaning that ventilates culture as much as it cools air.

Her ongoing creative dialogue between Puerto Rico and Chicago is both literal and symbolic. “El injerto,” or ”the graft,” is her metaphor for this dual belonging. Just as two plants can be joined to grow stronger together, her work joins histories of Puerto Rican craft and Chicago’s social fabric, producing something resilient, hybrid, and alive.

Through projects like The Franklin, the exhibition space she co-founded with her husband in their East Garfield Park backyard, Soto has created an evolving site of gathering and generosity. More than a venue, it is a manifestation of what she calls “the love and pain that come with the anguish of loving what has been lost, loving from a distance, and enduring the cycle of coming and going.” These are the textures of migration, turned here into acts of hospitality.

Grafting as Cultural Practice

Soto’s interpretation of graft resonates deeply within Chicago’s creative community. Earlier this fall, architect Jeanne Gang used the same word to describe design as an act of joining—of linking ideas, materials, and people to create systems that support new forms of life. For Gang, grafting was a way to articulate how architecture can connect ecosystems and communities. For Soto, it becomes a personal and political gesture: a way to reconcile distance, to root cultural identity in unfamiliar soil, and to prove that hybridity can be generative rather than divisive.

Both designers remind us that grafting is not assimilation. It is an insistence on growth through connection, a practice of care that strengthens what survives the cut. In Soto’s case, it manifests through decorative patterns and architectural interventions; in Gang’s, through ecological design and spatial empathy. Each, in their own way, redefines what it means to build with dignity.

Edra Soto share House Island, a 2022 installation in Chicago

Chicago as Living Archive

In Soto’s Chicago, art is not something to be placed on a wall but something to be lived with and through. The city becomes a living archive of her dual identity: part colonial inheritance, part creative resistance. Her architectural interventions—importing the decorative language of Puerto Rican homes into Chicago’s urban landscape—reframe how we see working-class design traditions, elevating them from invisibility to civic celebration.

Each project, whether an intimate sculpture or a public commission, becomes a gesture of translation. Her installations invite the viewer not simply to look, but to dwell—to occupy the emotional and spatial distance between one place and another. “Recognizing the necessary information to provide a more complete experience,” she said, “means acknowledging the love and pain that come with the anguish of loving what has been lost.”

A Dwelling for Dignity

In closing, Soto redefined designing for dignity as an act of care. “It goes beyond simply making things work,” she said. “It’s about creating spaces and experiences that make everyone feel safe, comfortable, and included.”

Through her practice, Soto has built more than objects or exhibitions. She has built conditions for empathy. By foregrounding Puerto Rican narratives within Chicago’s urban fabric, she honors and reinforces both places. Her work reminds us that dwelling is not only about where we live but also about how we choose to live together.

Perhaps most importantly, her act of presenting in Spanish was itself a dwelling: an affirmation that language, too, is architecture.

Edra Park interacts and performs with the audience

This reflection is part of The Raygency’s ongoing series on dialogue in design, inspired by the 2025 Deem Symposium at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Each story in the series explores how conversation, culture, and communication shape design practice and, together, build spaces for shared understanding.