House of Hope (2026)
House of Hopefully Soon: or Hopefully This Supplement Can Create the Super-Artist
An ongoing art piece by Dalin Waldo
How many more supplements?
How balanced should a body become?
Is this the final pill that will change everything?
House of Hope is an ongoing sculptural project by Dalin Waldo. Each week, Waldo adds a new bottle of supplements to a growing stack — an accumulation that will, in time, become an entire house built from every supplement xe has taken across xir lifetime. It is a monument of capsules and powders, of optimism, obsession, and survival.
The project emerges from a life shaped by chronic dysregulation, CPTSD, and the perpetual alarm of a body pushed into crisis. Waldo has often felt incorrectly calibrated in the world, and the bottles become both documentation and relics of the continuous attempt to correct that calibration. With every panic spike, hormonal crash, or sudden wave of stress, the cycle restarts. Balance dissolves. The Sisyphus stone rolls back down the hill. A new supplement joins the house.
This is the Sisyphus Complex at the core of the work:
the never-ending pursuit of the perfectly regulated artist — the fantasy of a body that wakes, produces, and sleeps without obstruction, without trauma, without friction. A human engine built for pure creation.
Yet House of Hope also exposes the paradox beneath that pursuit.
Waldo carries an extreme fear of losing focus — a fear so strong that procrastination becomes its own loop, delaying the beginning again and again. Instead of a clean moment of creation, we witness xem circling the edges of xirs own studio, hovering around the work, avoiding the terror of beginning because beginning might reveal the terror of not being able to focus enough to complete it. It is another Sisyphus-motion: orbiting the start instead of rolling the stone.
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__________Performance _________
In the performance version of House of Hope, this internal landscape becomes visible. Waldo spends hours talking to friends, therapists, and AI, trying to figure out what to do, what others do, what “focus” even is. The House of Hope is built for the first time in public, using a supplement collection three years in the making. A screen-shared projection exposes the endless searching, spirals, research, self-convincing, and repeated conversations with AI for comfort and motivation.
The studio of Waldo is recreated as a kind of character, and participants can choose to engage directly with xem about staying focused, falling apart, restarting, trying again. Procrastination becomes its own art form — an unfiltered artist wanting to become a super-artist but trapped inside the loop of fear and perfection. Music and art once saved Waldo, but now even that is threatened by the terror of not being able to succeed at the one language xe has always relied on.
Instead of creativity acting as a life-raft, there is pill-popping, supplements, vitamins, protein shakes — attempts to rescue the brain, regulate the nervous system, stimulate cognition, and rebuild focus in real time. Hyper-focus on nutrition and self-optimisation becomes part of the performance itself.
The bottles therefore become more than supplements.
They are architecture.
They are evidence.
They are Sisyphus’ stones.
They are the physical trace of a trauma-body forever trying, forever recalibrating, forever hoping.
House of Hope is both a question and a home:
a fragile structure built from the desire to become whole —
and the fear that wholeness may never come.