Nhien Nguyen is a San Francisco Bay Area ceramic artist. She is inspired by stories and personal experiences that simultaneously inform and initiate dialogue with her audience. “9 Days to Disappear” is a response to anthropologist Jason De León's study into the remains of border crossing migrants who perished in the Sonoran Desert. He ran his experiment by laying out pig carcasses as human proxies to estimate decomposition time in the desert. The harsh environment and scavenging animals scattered all traces of the pigs’ bodies in as little as nine days. Carcasses were difficult to find and even more difficult to identify. Based on this result, De León surmised that mortality estimates for Sonoran Desert crossings were inaccurate, and most likely lower than actual. Further information can be found in Radiolab’s Border Trilogy podcasts and Jason de León’s The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail.