“Je est un autre” (I Is Somebody Else), Arthur Rimbaud once declared. But what if Rimbaud’s “I” were a group of women—a band of disgruntled urbanites who have abandoned their Palm Pilots to live an unscheduled life in the desert? Mai-Thu Perret explores this possibility with “The Crystal Frontier,” an ongoing project about a fictional all-female commune in New Mexico whose inhabitants raise chickens, cows, horses, and rabbits. Since 1999, Perret has been writing the story of this utopian community and creating curious objects that might be its artifacts, prototypes, props, or tools.

The tale’s

Chiharu Shiota, born in Osaka in 1972, settled in Germany in 1996, initially to study with Marina Abramović; she has lived in Berlin since 1997. Her path of development is paradigmatic for its time: Her studio rooms in Mitte were in a building formerly occupied by squatters; later she participated in exhibitions that focused on her Japanese heritage, underscoring Berlin’s new multiculturalism and openness in its dealings with foreigners. Shiota soon found herself growing uneasy about this reference to alterity, though. “Often, when there’s a show here, people who come to look think, ‘Ah, a