UNDISCIPLINED SHAPE-SHIFTING
Generative justice and re-indigenizing material culture, with Mae-Ling Lokko.
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUEMae-ling Lokko: That's a lovely way to think of things! I was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. I don't know much about the land there, I'll be honest, because I left when I was so young. I grew up in Asia. My mother's homeland in the Philippines is where I feel grounded. She grew up in the sugar bowl region called Ma-ao. As for my father, his land in Accra, Ghana is very much home for me right now, even though I didn't move there until I was fourteen years old. His ancestors were fishermen, builders, and farmers. That part of Accra is right on the Atlantic coast. So I guess water has always been important to my sense of home—with my mom coming from the islands and my dad coming from the coast.
That’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing. What strikes me about your work is how transdisciplinary you are. I was wondering if you could describe your practice and how you see the connections between the various disciplines in which you work.
I think it's a product of my upbringing that I've never felt like I belong in one camp or another, whether culturally or disciplinarily. I consider my undisciplined background a good thing. While architecture has been my home as a discipline, I also work as an artist and I collaborate extensively with scientists and engineers. These collaborations stem from my desire to understand materials. It's difficult to truly understand something if you're not looking at it from different angles and perspectives. Shapeshifting across expertise and learning different disciplinary vocabularies has been something that I do without reserve. But I’m patient when I enter a different disciplinary or cultural sphere, I learn how people do things and how they view things in order to meaningfully participate.
The culinary arts have been especially interesting to me because a lot of the architectural materials that I use come from our food system. I work with skins, stalks, leaves, and stems of plants—parts that are typically discarded once consuming the prized parts of the plant. Chefs have an intimate understanding of these materials and their potential impact. While architectural use of materials is more conservative due to a slower construction process, the culinary space also opens up new aspects of materials [that designers might not be looking at] such as their smell, sound, and tactility.
Shapeshifting across expertise and learning different disciplinary vocabularies has been something that I do without reserve. But I’m patient when I enter a different disciplinary or cultural sphere, I learn how people do things and how they view things in order to meaningfully participate.
In every project, we begin by trying to understand where alienated value—that is, value that is extracted rather than circulated through the systems that produced it—might exist within the economic framework the community is embedded within. Sometimes this value lies in people, and sometimes in materials. That's where we begin because we recognize the many ruptures in the material life cycles that we are a part of.
I've described generative justice as the bottom-up generation knowledge and circulation of value. In contrast, top-down systems, whether they’re the state or corporations, are impatient in their extraction of value from our lands and most of that value is accumulated by public or private owners. Consumers see very little of that value, and on top of that, at the end of many material lives, that value ends up as waste because these systems don't truly value the materials’ by-products. Top-down systems have no way of returning value back to their generating actors and mechanisms, whether that's the farmer, the land, or the consumers themselves who could be playing a significant role in these material cycles.
Generative justice is a guiding framework where architects and designers can break out of the system in which we're solely working in a commissioned and service-oriented role to owners as well as to consumers. Instead, architects can work with materials and actors from the bottom, the underbelly. This means working with materials that we deem as waste, because we don't understand or value them well enough. It means working with farmers. It also means working with new types of social enterprises in our food, textile, and building sectors that are trying to return value back in a way that ensures the long-term health of communities and their surrounding ecosystems.
However, I also realized that the more I used these materials, the more I was building up the demand for those resources in the built environment. This is particularly relevant when it comes to new construction in the Global South, where a significant increase in demand would multiply the impacts of the byproduct’s commodification. It became clear to me that scaling up the demand for materials was not so simple. The decision-making process around what we value in the plants needs to be fully fleshed out and accessible to everyone who is part of this broader material value chain. First, we must make visible what we value so that we can determine how to design with these materials to support what we ultimately want: healthy soil and a more equitable society.
Top-down systems have no way of returning value back to their generating actors and mechanisms, whether that's the farmer, the land, or the consumers themselves who could be playing a significant role in these material cycles.
NOTES
1. “Sister crops” refers to a companion planting strategy in which various species support each other throughout the growing cycle. Within the Americas, corn, beans, and squash (known as the “Three Sisters”) are the most common sister crop, wherein corn structurally supports the beans’ vines, beans fix nitrogen in the soil for nutrients, and squash offer groundcover to preserve soil moisture.
There’s a huge risk when it comes to cultural commodification and exploitation, which is why we need more biodiverse and Indigenous frameworks. There's forms of Indigenous knowledge that we're learning—or relearning about: herbal, medicinal, and even cleaning properties of plant and organic materials, beyond just their commodified applications. These knowledges always bank on long-term biodiversity. In Indigenous farming practices, you’ll always find a wide group of plants, fungi, and other elements in the ecology that participate. To isolate or make one element supreme over the other was never the goal.
In post-industrial contexts, there’s a very different economy and value system around plants and their material uses compared to traditional practices we have been alienated from. Through my work I've realized that architectural designers have to become more familiar with these plant and organic materials—in the same way that a good chef understands them. For example, a chef cooking with beef knows which part of the cow will be most valuable. They also know which cooking techniques would bring out the taste and the texture of a particular cut. This comes from understanding the history of the animal and valuing the context in which it's grown up. They think about the various transformative pathways that could celebrate the life of that animal based on its unique properties and how it’s prepared. I think about this approach when working with plants, because the root of a plant could give you color, dye, or medicine. The stalk of a plant is something very different from the root since it’s above ground. It's got to breathe and it’s able to transport things through leaves and the husks are incredibly strong. There are many amazing properties in one plant. When you look at the context surrounding plants, you see how they could collectively become part of a larger material strategy.
To make this less abstract: If we seasonally grow “sister crops,”1 and we know that this Indigenous practice has socially and environmentally ensured the health of our soil, then how do we design materials that support that paradigm? What materials could a biodiverse farm ultimately generate through seasonal mixing, matching, and development of processes that support regenerative principles?
First, we must make visible what we value so that we can determine how to design with these materials to support what we ultimately want...
I didn't fully understand the life of these crops as plants on farms until I was working on coconut husks during my PhD [at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute]. The first time I visited coconut farms in Ghana, I encountered very different operations, from two- to three-acre smallholder farmers to large cooperatives and commercial coconut farms. Agricultural communities have such robust social networks, and at the time I didn't realize how important these social networks were in driving the coconut economy in Ghana. Everyone's connected. The urban trader who's selling coconut in your neighborhood has an extensive network of extended family and regional connections that allow them to sell quickly in the city and communicate back to the villages when they need more coconuts. Similar to working in a new space or discipline, I always carefully approach such social networks horizontally and learn about their hierarchy and protocols for participation while trying to understand their long-term goals.
There's always an excitement when you're able to transform materials into high-value products and say, “Here's something that you weren't earning money from but that could be an interesting source of revenue.” But as much as money and value is promised to bring people on board, there's always something else that is actually more important, whether that’s the health of the soil—because they're experiencing devastating environmental degradation from monocultures right at the boundary of their farm—or leveraging against the dominant social conventions on farms that they're trying to break out of. Ultimately, understanding these motivations is what gets some of these projects off the ground. It's a thread that ties us together and helps us to build relationships.
It really is. Have you ever gardened or grown your own plants?
I did. I… Oh my God. [laughs]
I'm a terrible, terrible farmer—it's such hard work. Before I started teaching at Yale, I took a full year off from academia to work with a chef. I had been invited by a mentor of mine, the artist El Anatsui (a famous Ghanaian sculptor who makes these beautiful hanging sculptures out of bottle caps) to do an art residency. I decided to collaborate with my close friend Selassie Atadika, a fantastic chef who champions Indigenous ingredients. As part of the residency, we grew Indigenous African rice varieties—seeds that hadn’t been planted in Ghana for centuries, as Asian varieties had largely displaced them.
We farmed about 126 accessions of Indigenous African rice over the course of a year. It was a very eye-opening experience because I never thought planting could be so physically demanding. [laughs]
Because rice is such a thirsty plant, at every stage of its life cycle, you have to control its water. Then, even once it’s ready to be harvested, the birds come for the seeds. You need to be vigilant in knowing which plants are ready to be plucked, as otherwise someone else is gonna beat you to it. So yeah, that was exhausting, but that was my first experience going through multiple harvest cycles with any plant.
Through work with plant colorants, I’ve come across George Washington Carver’s paintings [in the post-Reconstruction era]. Carver developed these beautiful paintings from plant-based sources. He would hunt for pigments to create dye baths from different plants, and he would visit quarries to develop clay color washes as opposed to plain whitewashes. Carver, who was a formerly enslaved person, took such inspiration from the plant and geological landscape around him. Right now I have a grant in partnership with Tuskegee University for a project titled “Civilizations of Color,” where we’re looking at clay paints and plant-based color to see how that might inform different ways of dyeing not just textiles but also building materials. Subsequent generations have yet to thoroughly look back at Carver’s work to see how we might rethink the paradigm for producing color.
The subject matter around color has been a wonderful way of reconnecting with my former research on domestic Afro-diasporic architecture first developed during the transatlantic slave trade. That history is incredibly heavy and dark. Through his agricultural innovations, Carver created something generative not only to survive that experience but also to help many other incoming farmers during that [post-Reconstruction] era create meaningful lives through his democratization of information to farming communities. It's that spirit which is guiding the work.
I love George Washington Carver as well but I didn't know anything about his pigment-related work. It's also interesting to hear that he made artwork, because there are these perceived boundaries between ecological practices and artistic, design, and built environment practices. The material cultures of vernacular or Indigenous architectures reflect the integration of the built and natural environment, and I’m curious how this translates into your research. Do you see a way forward in blurring this line between the built and the natural environment in a contemporary context? And do you think it's possible in this era for people to reorient themselves toward that perspective again?
With buildings, even if there is a material medium to blur those boundaries, there are deeper psychological shifts that have to happen. There's a huge feeling of security when we can close our door and completely control air, water, or any type of creature coming in. That's a very difficult mindset to shift. We have to develop a different relationship to plants, animals, and fungi, but how do we do this while still ensuring some level of security? We cannot build the way we used to because we're not the same. And that's where innovation can come in. How do we start to mediate the aspirations we have around having a reconnection to other actors and materials in our ecology, while also bearing in mind that we desire a deep sense of security? Those considerations, I feel, are the biggest barriers because otherwise, the blurring can actually be quite superficial.
I'm writing a paper right now about sweating, which is such a natural thing we've evolved to do to enable us to move between very different bioclimatic contexts—from the rainforest, for instance, to an open grassland. Yet socially today, to sweat evokes all of these negative dimensions: discomfort, heat, fear, anxiety. So how do you reprogram those perceptions? Sweating is endemic, even with our built-in culture. Our air conditioning systems are designed to make sure we don't sweat, and we don't like our materials to sweat. That antibiotic, anti-sweat culture reflects a broader cultural disconnect that happens in natural environments. When we encourage that reconnection, it means reconnecting with our bodies and with what's outside in equal amounts.
We have to develop a different relationship to plants, animals, and fungi, but how do we do this while still ensuring some level of security? We cannot build the way we used to because we're not the same.
When you were talking about sweat, I was thinking about Tiffany Lethabo King’s book,The Black Shoals [2019], where she describes sweating as a process of contamination. The sweat of enslaved Black people who were forcibly laboring on indigo plantations disrupted the colonial order because their dripping of sweat held the potential to ruin the batch of indigo being processed. When describing the staining of hands [with indigo], she also described pores as portals between the natural world and our bodies, through which the biomatter of the plant’s pigment was absorbed by the human.
Oh my God, I have to thank you for that. I'm going to look it up.
Of course. I'm excited to see how you write about this and to see your broader emerging body of work that has yet to come. This has been an amazing conversation and it was really lovely to have a window into your work.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Simone.