Disegno #31

The Quarterly Journal of Design #31 Winter 2021/22

This issue includes: Fitting photos with Matty Bovan; bacterial beauty in Shellworks’ biodegradable packaging; a study of the architecture of Himalayan Ladakh; OnlyFans and the crusade against online ass; lonely day trips to Gipsön, Sweden’s secret radioactive island; plant-based design with Studio d-o-t-s, Ioana Man, Fernando Laposse and company; and MSCHF’s consumerist satire.

UK £15

A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention

cca.qc.ca/catchingupwithlife

What will you do if you live to 100? How many parents do you have? We ask these and other questions in our upcoming book, published as part of our one-year investigation Catching Up with Life. Co-published by the CCA and Spector Books, available in December 2021.

Disegno

2

The Sugar Pot Words Oli Stratford

The coffees had just been served when my dining companion began fiddling with the sugar pot. I really like this, they said, turning it over in their hands.

Unacceptable, I thought.

My design critic training kicked in immediately. This sugar pot, I explained in clipped tones, was absolute garbage. My companion replied that they didn’t think it was. I was not to be deterred.

Look at this mechanism, I said, tapping it with the kind of confidence typically reserved for presenting DNA evidence before a grand jury. Over-engineered trash. My companion frowned. That’s the bit I like about it, they explained. It’s fun.

Fun? A sugar pot is no place for fun, I thought.

It’s there for the serious business of administering sugar. But this mechanism was anything but serious.

Its aperture was covered by a thin tongue of metal.

Press down on the lever and a tangle of gears were set in motion, sending this slip of a cover sliding backwards, ultimately exposing the sugar within. See, I concluded triumphantly. Too many parts. Anything could go wrong. There are four parts, they replied.

Disegno

It was so clear that a simple flip lid was all that was required. But, then, I suppose it takes a professional to notice such things. This, of course, is the plight of the design editor. Rather than doing anything obviously beneficial for society – such as caring for the sick, maintaining essential infrastructure or generating culture of our own – our task is a subtler, more onerous one. Standing alone, we must shoulder the burden of explaining why you’re wrong to like all the things you think you like. Were we not here, just imagine how many parts might sneak into our sugar pot mechanisms. Five, six, seven? Forty-eight? Madness.

EXCESSIVELY ARTICULATED, we might roar, our brows beetling as we peer at a lamp. OR-NA-MEN-TAL, a vase withering before the ferocity of our gaze. BOURGEOIS CAPITALIST APOLOGIA, a stacking chair blasted in a burning furnace of righteous, MacBook Pro-typed invective. If not for us, who would police taste? What if Wrongness were allowed to proliferate far and wide?

It’s just a sugar pot, my companion said. But it’s clearly got something or we wouldn’t still be talking about it.

Well, they may have had a point there. I mean, it’s filled this intro at least.

4

Contents 3

Introduction The Sugar Pot

6

Contents

8

Contributors

10

Masthead The people behind Disegno

13

Timeline September to November 2021 in review

19

The Online Ass Wars No porn please, we’re social media monopolies

31

Fitting Photos Behind the lens with Matty Bovan

84

A Topography for Encounter A journey into Herzog and de Meuron’s M+

42

Inverted Grounds; Tethered Geographies Resistance and ecological interdependence in Ladakh

102

Welcome to the Island Day trips to a secret land of radioactive waste

116

60

Plants ≠ Objects Conspiring with vegetal life to change design

The Spicy Present MSCHF turns product design into performance art

72

The Biodegradable Aphrodite Sated bacteria and sustainable beauty packaging

6

MAXI SLIDING PANELS, SELF BOLD CABINET. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

London Flagship Store 83-85 Wigmore Street W1U1DL London london@rimadesio.co.uk +44 020 74862193

Contributors Carolina Are published the first study on the shadowbanning of pole dancing in Feminist Media Studies. You can find her on social media at @bloggeronpole. p. 19 Crystal Bennes is tired. p. 102 Bowy Chan took a quick walk inside a black box building. p. 84 Emanuele Coccia is an associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. p. 60 Exotic Cancer can be found at both @exotic.cancer and @exotic.cancerr. p.19 Studio d-o-t-s recently bought an old Mercedes van and are looking for the perfect place to settle (if there is such a place). p. 60

Gianluca Giabardo is obsessed – at the same time – with co-existence and baking bread. p. 60 Dean Kaufman awoke from a vivid dream, which clearly described him being in possession of the authentic drawing from MSCHF’s recent drop, Possibly Real Copy Of Fairies by Andy Warhol. p. 116 Juliana Kei believes the Earth is fluid. p. 84 Fernando Laposse is essentially a glorified farmer. p. 60

Natasha Myers has been abducted by the plants, and is following their instructions to seed plant-people conspiracies everywhere. p. 60 Overmind is both a space hiker and a mystic scavenger. p. 60 Livia Rossi has a very poor sense of orientation and gets lost all the time, which is perhaps why she likes to embrace, both physically and metaphorically, the unknown. p. 60 Oorvi Sharma is an architect and independent researcher. p. 42

Ioana Man is really into fermentation, both in her kitchen and beyond. p. 60

Sophie Tolhurst is after some book recommendations. p. 31

Theresa Marx is a photographer represented by Mink Mgmt. p. 72

Tushar Verma is an architect. p. 42

8

HAL Lounge Chair Jasper Morrison, 2021



Available through selected Vitra Home dealers: Aram Designs, London, aram.co.uk · Chaplins Furniture, Greater London, chaplins.co.uk · Couch Potato Company, London, couchpotatocompany.com · Heal’s, London, heals.com · Holloways of Ludlow, London, hollowaysofludlow.com · Ivor Innes, Kingston upon Hull, innes.co.uk · Nest, Sheffield, nest.co.uk · Tangram Furnishers, Edinburgh, tangramfurnishers.co.uk · The Conran Shop, London, conranshop.co.uk · Twentytwentyone, London, twentytwentyone.com · Urbansuite, Manchester, urbansuite.co.uk

The Quarterly Journal of Design #31 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Senior sales executive Umaima Walia umaima@disegnojournal.com

Creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Advertising representative – Italy Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com

Fact checker Ann Morgan

Circulation and stockist enquiries Adam Long along@thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Distribution The Logical Choice thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Contributors Carolina Are, Crystal Bennes, Bowy Chan, Emanuele Coccia, Laura Drouet, Exotic Cancer, Gianluca Giabardo, Evi Hall, Dean Kaufman, Juliana Kei, Olivier Lacrouts, Fernando Laposse, Ioana Man, Theresa Marx, Natasha Myers, Overmind, Livia Rossi, Oorvi Sharma, Oli Stratford, Sophie Tolhurst and Tushar Verma.

Thanks Many thanks to Oorvi Sharma and all the participants in the ‘Plants ≠ Objects’ roundtable for their flexibility; Anna Holden for her rapid design work; AHEC for another superb season of Words on Wood; and ARC Club for giving us a place to call home.

Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Edition Offset 120gsm by Antalis. The cover is printed on Arena Extra White Smooth 250gsm

by Fedrigoni.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made Disegno #31 possible – not least Briar the cat, who has diligently attended every meeting, as well as Bertie and Coco the dogs, who have attempted to participate in every podcast. We salute their commitment to the cause.

Contents copyright The contents of this journal belong to Disegno Publications Limited and to the authors and artists featured.

If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

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The Crit You can keep up with Disegno and our work by listening to The Crit, a podcast focused on the design world and its impact on current affairs. disegnojournal.com/podcasts/the-crit Contact us 50 Wenham House Ascalon Street London SW8 4DZ disegnojournal.com

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Masthead

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SEPTEMBER

complex, which handles around 40 per

Get set, go

cent of all container imports to the

Netflixers around the world

Pauline Deltour (1983-2021)

US. In the “before times”, it was rare

collectively went crazy for Squid

The designer Pauline Deltour first

for more than one container ship to

Game, a South Korean drama that

appeared in Disegno back in 2018

be left waiting for berth; at the

premiered in September, transposing

with Monimalz – a connected piggy

backlog’s initial peak, 73 were

the country’s very real personal

bank that she had designed for La

awaiting the opportunity to disgorge

debt crisis onto a fictional secret

Poste. Recasting the coin container

cargo. It's a backlog created by a

gameshow where players compete for

as a digital object, variously styled

pandemic-prompted buying boom, mixed

a cash prize – imagine a cross between

as a cartoon whale, panda and monkey,

in with fewer port workers and lorry

The Most Dangerous Game and Battle

Monimalz was a perfect example of

drivers (thanks in part to Covid

Royale. Just as captivating as Squid

Deltour’s design: rich in charm, wit

outbreaks), all adding up to produce

Game's gut-wrenching interpersonal

and beauty, but also precise, rigorous

a bottleneck on a colossal scale.

drama and stomach-turning gore,

and immaculately detailed. Throughout

It’s just one manifestation of the

however, was its set design, with

her career, which began at Konstantin

international supply chain crisis,

art director Chae Kyoung-sun creating

Grcic Industrial Design before she

which looks likely to continue as

nightmarish playgrounds-on-acid for

left to found her own Paris studio

the global north heads towards the

the bloodbaths to play out on. “All

in 2011, Deltour was able to weave

bloated holiday season. Stuff, it

spaces in the game world are built

together these disparate strands

seems, it here to stay.

in sets,” Chae told Variety. “The art

within her work – a combination she

teams had to think like a designer

described as “severe and delicate”

who created the games.” Basic shapes,

– to create objects of extraordinary

bright colours and childhood nostalgia

richness. Her death in September took

featured heavily, with Chae also

away one of design’s brightest young

peppering her sets with hidden

practitioners; it is testament to her

secrets, such as the mysterious games

talent that her legacy within the field

being spelt out by the tiles of the

was already secured.

dormitory. But some of the symbolism remained an inside joke. The pink ribbons gift wrapping each black coffin? Those were inspired by Chae’s love of Kpop girl group Blackpink.

Fair play

With more than 111 million viewers

We are still very much in a pandemic,

around the world entranced by the

but after a year of Covid calendar

show’s aesthetic, will pastel colour

chaos, it seems that design fairs

palettes hit different now?

couldn’t wait to return. In September, Paris hosted Maison et Objet; Milan, the Salone del Mobile; and London Images courtesy of Pauline Deltour Design Office/ Stephanie Füssenich; Pixabay; and Netflix.

brought back its own Design Festival, all of which invited overseas guests to attend in-person. With vaccination schemes in place for wealthy countries and testing systems that support international travel, the fairs bounced back after their year in the wilderness, albeit in altered, leaner formats. Salone, for example, was reduced from its pre-pandemic pomp,

OCTOBER

but did introduce a novel system whereby members of the public could

Paris. London. Milan. Springfield?

The colossus of backlogs

attend the fair and buy products

Everybody knows that The Simpsons

While the start of the pandemic

directly. Given that anecdotal

has been in decline for years, but

may have been marked by shortages,

reports suggest attendees enjoyed

in October the long-running cartoon

a year and a half on it has become

this less full-throttle fair

shook off the cobwebs and returned

characterised by an over-accumulation

experience, perhaps opportunities

to the forefront of pop culture.

of stuff – albeit often in the wrong

to browse, rather than be bombarded,

Partnering with Balenciaga, the show

place at the wrong time. September saw

could become a permanent fixture.

created a special 10-minute episode

record queues of shipping containers

that replaced the brand's traditional

at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port

catwalk with an animated cavalcade

Disegno

of the Parisian fashion house’s recent

LGBTQ+ people of colour. Posters are

community may have to say goodbye

designs, dutifully modelled by some

a traditional design medium, and one

to the high of supertall skyscrapers.

of Springfield’s finest. The plot

that can be easily overlooked, but

was delightfully schlocky (creative

Fayaz’s work stands apart for its

director Demna Gvasalia gamely sending

social purpose and activism, anchoring

A global snow day

himself up as a preposterous couturier

his illustration in a desire to serve

Six hours of Zuckerberg-free silence.

determined to bring eleganza to a

and reflect his community. “He really

In early October, a series of faulty

fashion-deprived Springfield), but

has documented an extraordinary

configuration changes on routers at

also steeped in warmth, nostalgia

community of queer [and/or] trans

a data centre in Santa Clara managed

and cartoon goofiness. This was

people of colour who at times are

what legislators around the world have

a smart skewering of fashion’s

very vulnerable and at others are

been hitherto unable to: take down

pretensions, but also a celebration

happy and joyous,” said the critic

Facebook, along with its sister apps

of its craft (the animated garments

Alice Rawsthorn, a member of the

Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and

looked beautiful, even when wrapped

Hublot jury. “I think he’s caught

Oculus. As engineers rushed to fix

around the exaggerated proportions

their complexities and subtleties

the issue (apparently hampered by

of Homer and company) and a welcome

and idiosyncrasies, and that’s such

the fact that their entrance passes

reminder that even this most rarefied

a difficult thing to do.” It remains

to server areas are lopped through,

of design fields can still be fun,

subjective, of course, but Fayaz is

you guessed it, Facebook technology),

of the zeitgeist, and welcoming to

a more than worthy winner.

organisations around the world went

those who sit outside its exclusive

into meltdown, with the apps and

ecosystem of catwalks and soirees.

platforms through which they conduct

At the time of writing, the film has

much of their business rendered

been watched on YouTube close to 9m

useless. There is a lesson in this

times – however briefly, Balenciaga

about the dangers of allowing one

has made The Simpsons relevant again.

company to control so much of the world's communications infrastructure, but it's not one that Zuckerberg and company seem ready to learn, with Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri downplaying the issue as “a snow day”. may be, it doesn't do much to grapple

October proved a sad month for

with the underlying precariousness.

starchitects, with the Chinese

For instance, just imagine if Facebook

government announcing a policy that

tried to do something completely mad,

limits the height of new skyscrapers

like entirely colliding physical

in small cities. Towers in cities of

and digital reality in some kind

a population of 3 million or fewer

of “metaverse” that ran exclusively

are to be restricted to a maximum

on those same stricken routers.

height of 150m, with this height cap

What then…?

following a July ban on skyscrapers over 500m tall (unless special government dispensation is acquired).

FKA Facebook

Seen together, the policies amount

So, remember that social media company

Complexities, subtleties and idiosyncrasies

to increasing restrictions within a

accused of using addictive algorithms

Design awards are invariably a little

nation where architecture has spent

to push divisive content to radicalise

silly and subjective, fruitlessly

much of the 21st century striving for

people or destroy their mental health

comparing clearly incommensurate works

iconicity (viz: tallness/weirdness).

for profit? I think it was called

within a field that lacks any clear

It’s a sensible move for various

Facebook, or something? Anyway, here

metric for determining value. Even

environmental and safety reasons,

comes Meta, a social media – sorry,

so, sometimes they manage to get things

particularly given the May 2021 case

social technology – company that

spectacularly right. In mid-October,

of a 71-storey, 300m-tall skyscraper

is going to (allegedly) revolutionise

the illustrator Mohammed Iman Fayaz

in Shenzhen, which began to tremble

the way humans communicate with

was named the recipient of the CHF

in high winds, triggering a rapid

friends, family and co-workers via

100,000 Hublot Design Prize. A member

evacuation. The cause? A 50m mast

the metaverse. What is the metaverse,

of the New York art collective Papi

atop the building which has since

you cry? Well, it’s the brave new

Juice, Fayaz was selected for his

been removed. After decades of

world of augmented and virtual

work producing posters for nightlife,

racing to break records in the

reality, where you can layer fantastic

protests and fundraisers supporting

country, the international building

digital landscapes over your grey

14

Images courtesy of The Simpsons 20th TV Animation; Hublot; Meta; UC Santa Barbara; and the UN/Kiara Worth.

Well, as charming an image as that

Shaking up the skyline

everyday, kind of like a reverse

NOVEMBER

the fossil fuel industry. That's

Matrix. Fun when it was Pokémon Go,

right, those guys. Global Witness,

maybe not so fun when it’s getting

A room without a view

an NGO that investigated the UN’s

fired in VR for unionising, or having

You have to admire the self-confidence

participant list, discovered that

to don a silly headset so you can

of Charlie Munger, the billionaire

503 delegates are lobbyists of the

listen to your racist relatives spout

donor and designer of Munger Hall,

oil and gas industries. That’s larger

conspiracy theories in surround sound.

a proposed hall of residence at

than the country with the largest

The new Facebook Meta logo features

the University of California,

delegation, Brazil; larger than the

a squashed möbius strip, presumably

Santa Barbara, which will provide

combined representatives from the

to remind you that you can never

dormitories for 4,500 students.

eight countries worst affected by

escape the infinity loop of content.

The scheme, Munger told Architectural

climate change in the past 20 years;

How meta.

Record, is based on Le Corbusier's

and double the size of the UNFCCC's

Unité d’Habitation, but will improve

official indigenous delegation.

upon it in every respect. “The whole

Considering the fossil fuel industry’s

thing didn't work worth shit,” Munger

long and inglorious history of

said. "I've fixed that.” It's nice that

suppressing and lobbying against

Munger believes in himself, because

climate research, you would have

his design has already prompted one

thought that the world would have

member of the university's design

had enough of them by now. Who keeps

review committee to resign in horror,

inviting them to these things?

explaining that they were “disturbed”

by Munger Hall. One glaring problem is that 94 per cent of students living in the hall will have no natural light

Bitcoin bites both ways

in their dormitories. This, Munger

Late in October, El Salvador developed

argues, is completely fine. Students

a (crypto)currency conundrum. As of

will instead have digital windows,

June 2021, the country has accepted

inspired by the "Magical Portholes”

Bitcoin as legal tender – a move hoped

on Disney cruise ships: basically

to prove democratising in a nation

TVs that screen footage of the outside

with a low uptake on bank accounts, but

world. Munger, for one, is sold. “[We]

high levels of smartphone ownership.

will give the students knobs, and they

Despite these good intentions, the

can have whatever light they want,” he

The history of futures yet to come

Salvadorian government was forced

gushed. “Real windows don't do that.”

The long shuttered Smithsonian Arts

to disable a key function of its

I mean, you have to give him that one.

and Industries Building (AIB) on

Chivo Bitcoin wallet app after traders

Real windows definitely don’t do that.

Washington’s National Mall has finally

discovered a loophole in its design.

reopened, having first closed for

Bitcoin is tied to real-time market

structural reasons way back in 2004.

fluctuations and is, therefore,

Hurrah! The museum hopes to bounce

notoriously volatile; transactions

back with FUTURES, a building-wide

become tricky when the price of your

arts and science exhibition exploring

lunch could change in a matter of

possible options for humanity’s next

seconds. To resolve this, Chivo

steps. It’s an exciting, forward-

included a “freeze” function, whereby

looking show, and one that may prove

the price of a transaction remained

a shot in the arm for a building very

the same for 60 seconds such that

much tied to the Smithsonian’s past.

payments could take place without

Originally named the National Museum,

sudden variations in price. Crypto

the AIB has, over time, relinquished

traders, however, realised that if

A sticky delegation

parts of its collection to spawn other

you compared the frozen price with

At the time of writing, the eyes

Smithsonian institutions: the National

the real-world price when exchanging

of the world are turned skeptically,

Museum of Natural History, National

Bitcoin for, say, US dollars, you

hopefully, expectantly towards Glasgow

Museum of American History, and the

could buy or sell Bitcoin at a profit

and the outcome of its COP26 summit.

National Air and Space Museum. At this

based on the difference between the

With representatives gathered from

point, you wonder if the future was

two. Cheeky. The great democratisation

around the world, it’s a pivotal

the only subject matter left for the

through Bitcoin may require a little

moment in averting climate collapse.

AIB. Its path beyond the inaugural

more design work yet.

So it left a bitter taste when we

exhibition is as yet unannounced, but

learned that the biggest delegation

we can’t help but wonder whether the

represented at COP26 is, in fact,

AIB will commit itself long term to

Disegno

being a “home for the future-

unveiled its vision for a bulbous

curious”(as its homepage tagline

glass pod offering panoramic views

currently styles itself). If so,

of the city, ringed by a perimeter

let’s hope there’s still enough

of gondola rides and perched atop

future to go around.

a supertall concrete column. Dubbed The Tulip, it was set to sprout from the back garden of the Gherkin in

Masters of green design

the city's crowded business district.

With concern over climate change

It was the proposal that spawned a

(rightly) at an all time high,

thousand photoshops, with internet

designers are increasingly under

wags pointing out that it looked more

pressure to deliver sustainable

like a sex toy than a family-friendly

projects. Step forward Cambridge

day out. The Tulip got through local

University, which is responding

planning, but was blocked in 2019 by

to the crisis with a new Master

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. There were

of Design (MDes) degree. The course

fears, however, that the government's

is aimed at equipping students to

Department for Levelling up, Housing

address issues such as achieving

and Communities (another cringe 2021

net zero carbon emissions by 2050,

rebrand) would ultimately decide

as well as “societal and environmental

to level-up London with this crime

issues, including poverty”. Whether

against eyeballs. Fortunately, the

these things are actually design

Tulip was pruned at the final hurdle,

issues is suspect, but the course’s

with the planning inspector slamming

combination of the arts and sciences

its “very high embodied energy" and

(it is a joint venture from the

“unsustainable whole life-cycle”.

university’s architecture, engineering

A small green win for the books.

and materials science faculties) is welcome. It also aims to address an interconnected issue: the lack of diversity in design. Fewer than 40 per cent of applicants to Cambridge’s engineering and architectural design courses are women, so the university has decided admissions will look beyond simply taking those with top grades from male-heavy subjects such as physics. So far, men of science have done a pretty poor job as stewards of the environment.

Perhaps it’s wise to let others

Images courtesy of Pixabay; and Foster + Partners/The Tulip.

have a shot before it’s too late.

Tulip fever breaks Pour one out for Norman Foster, whose outré design for a 305.3m high tourist attraction in the City of London was finally kicked to the curb in November.

Back in 2018, Foster + Partners

16

the new lighting family by stefan diez

midgard.com

The Online Ass Wars Words Carolina Are Illustrations Exotic Cancer

In an interview from November 2019, a spokesperson for Facebook, whose parent company Meta also owns Instagram, told me that it feels there are other platforms where users can post nudity and sexuality-related content. As became clear from the company’s Terms of Use update in December 2020, this kind of content was no longer welcome on the platform.

Disegno

Banning everything from strip-club shows to erotic art, from self-pleasure to words alluding to sex, these new policies leave no room for interpretation: those trying to express themselves sexually or engaging in anything remotely similar to sex work should, for Facebook, take their posts elsewhere. And if they don’t agree to this, they – and their content – will be deleted.

This stance is emblematic of how online platforms treat sex, nudity and sex work more widely. While they may initially let creators attract traffic to the platform through likes, follows and reblogs, once their brand has become sufficiently established, they tend to kick sexual content to the curb. Now there are a shrinking number of mainstream online spaces where nudity and sexuality are still allowed, making NSFW (“not safe for work”) content the hot potato that each platform is trying to pass onto the next. This fear of visible sex is spreading across mainstream internet spaces, resulting in censorship, deletion and decreased visibility of nudity and sexuality from Backpage to Tumblr, from Instagram to TikTok, all the way through to one of the most recent sites to have made its name on the back of online porn: OnlyFans. But these efforts to purge sex and nudity from platforms in order to win over advertisers, investors and payment providers – all carried out under the pretence of ensuring users’ and children’s safety – reveal just how much the affordances of platform design, and the laws and interests that influence them, can have disastrous effects on users’ income and their freedom of expression. Nudity and sexual content are being designed out of platforms, making it harder for it to be produced safely and ethically.

When OnlyFans announced in August 2021 that it was going to ban all sexually explicit content from its platform, for instance, it was big news. Not just porn industry, naked-social-media-subcultures news: big news, mainstream news. “In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform,” the company explained, “we must evolve our content guidelines.”

Citing concerns from its “banking partners and payout providers”, OnlyFans said that content creators would need to comply with its guidelines by 1 October 2021.

By then, OnlyFans was a household name. It had been name-dropped by Beyoncé in a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s song ‘Savage’ and quickly become one of the most interesting, if risqué, tech success stories since its foundation in 2016. As of June 2021, OnlyFans was locked in talks to raise new funding

at a company valuation of more than $1bn, with its name having been made entirely on the back of home-made porn and sex workers, who had caused the platform to shoot to fame during a pandemic that made moving their work online a necessity as much as a privilege. In December 2019, the platform had a user base of 17 million, with this figure having risen to some 120 million by mid-2021. Meanwhile, the number of content creators rose from 120,000

Nudity and sexual content are being designed out of platforms, making it harder for it to be produced safely and ethically. in 2019 to around 2 million in 2021, with the site claiming that these creators had collectively earned more than $4.5bn since its foundation. “I’ve made more money on OnlyFans than I have on other platforms,” said creator @littlemistressboots to BuzzFeed in the spring of 2021, arguing that the subscription service helped them stay afloat after job losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. “It’s been a total game-changer for me.”

The platform had, for many sex workers, removed intermediaries such as production companies, pimps or club managers, bringing most of their earnings straight into workers’ hands. On top of that, it helped a variety of creators who couldn’t work traditional jobs make a living, too. Disabled user Sith told Chris Stokel-Walker at the New Statesman that, “[as] a disabled person, doing content creation allowed me to work from home and stay independent, while focusing on my health,” helping them to afford “life-saving medications”. Disabled Black sex worker Veronica Glasses, too, told Insider that working on OnlyFans has protected her from the racist and ableist abuse she received in strip clubs and on other social media platforms. “It’s a big misconception that people who pay for sex work are bad people,” Glasses said. “The majority of people being unkind are those who don’t think we need to be paid at all.” A side-hustle for some, 20

the platform is now a lifeline for many, providing a haven from the censorship that sex work and nudity face on other mainstream social networks.

So when OnlyFans released a press statement about its ban in August, without even informing its main user base prior to making the news public, it made headlines worldwide. “Can they do that?” wondered some people and, perhaps even more importantly, “Should they be forced to do that?”

“We literally made you, @OnlyFans,” tweeted Rebecca Crow, a sex worker activist and performer, highlighting the anger present within the sex worker community following the decision. “I couldn’t sleep last night. As a creator myself I’m shook,” wrote Gemma Rose, a stripper, pole dance instructor and sex worker activist, on her Instagram. “Many are left baffled at why a business would ban their top earners,” she continued. “Are they really that desperate to ‘clean up’ their platform to attract top investors?

Do they really despise [sex workers] that much, even though they are the reason this platform has become successful?”

OnlyFans claimed that it had decided to abandon its main nudity- and porn-based business model as a result of pressure from its payment providers.

“The change in policy, we had no choice – the short answer is banks,” OnlyFans’s founder Tim Stokely told The Financial Times, arguing that it had become “difficult to pay our creators” given that banks “cite reputational risk and refuse our business”. When OnlyFans then performed a U-turn on its proposed ban in September, the decision was explained not in terms of any ethical shift or meaningful change in policy, but rather as the result of it having received the “assurances necessary to support our diverse creator community” from its banking partners.

Inadvertently, OnlyFans had shone a light on the worst-kept secret influencing the design of content governance policy and infrastructure on tech platforms: that financial interests, combined with broad and flawed laws, affect what happens to users’ content far more than notions of safety or morality.

This may have been big news to the general public.

As a pole dance instructor whose content is variously hidden, deleted and banned from social media platforms, it wasn’t news to me. Looking back over recent years, we can clearly track how nudity has become increasingly unwelcome on mainstream social media platforms – OnlyFans was only following

suit from Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. OnlyFans’ decision was even less surprising to sex workers, who have had to be at the forefront of anti-censorship activism since day one as a result of the censorship and de-platforming that they continue to face.

But the truth is that sex workers and their efforts to distribute sexual content helped build the internet as we know it. The distribution of material depicting sex has long played a major role in the history of communications technology, from photography to home video and cable TV, when the sexual revolution of the 1970s collided with the birth of public-access television and increasingly affordable means of film production. It is only natural, then, writes the sexuality scholar Zahra Stardust, that sex workers were early adopters of the internet and social media platforms, variously “designing, coding, building, and using websites and cryptocurrencies to advertise [their work]”. “In our time of internet ubiquity,” Stardust adds, “sex workers often build up the commercial bases of platforms, populating content and increasing their size and commercial viability, only to later be excised and treated as collateral damage when those same platforms introduce policies to remove sex entirely.”

And yet, the (very necessary) efforts to regulate the internet have somehow become drenched in whorephobia, something which criminologist Jessica Simpson defines as “the hatred, disgust and fear of sex workers – that intersects with racism, xenophobia, classism and transphobia – leading to structural and interpersonal discrimination, violence, abuse and murder.” Stardust, as part of the Decoding Stigma collective formed with Gabriella Garcia and Chibundo Egwuatu, has also argued that whorephobia has become “encoded in tech design, despite the historically coconstitutive relationship between sexual labor and the development of digital media.”

Consensual sex work is clearly the wrong target in the urgent and vital field of moderating online harms.

On 6 January 2021, groups of far-right extremists, Donald Trump supporters, and followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory stormed the United States Capitol to disrupt the formalisation of the election of Joe Biden as President. While the Capitol attack was a wake-up call for those outside of the tech industry, digital activism or online moderation research, it proved what many within those spaces had been warning

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about for years: that the lack of moderation of hate speech, conspiracy theories and misinformation that had already affected global political events such as the 2016 US presidential election and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom could have devastating consequences for democracy. So where had legislators and platforms been looking in their attempts to curb harmful content from the internet?

Simple. They had been too busy fighting against ass.

And they had been fighting against ass for so long that sex and nudity became both a scapegoat for, and a cautionary tale about, laws’ unintended consequences when it comes to online moderation.

When we talk about online moderation of nudity and sexuality, even on a global scale, we are really talking about the effects of the joint 2018 US bills known as FOSTA/SESTA, which have widespread implications for international platforms. The House bill, FOSTA, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, and the Senate bill, SESTA, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, are an exception to Section 230 of the US Telecommunications act, which ruled that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider,” and should not therefore be held responsible for what third-parties posted on them.1 Section 230 is the legal provision that enables social media to exist as we know it, exempting platforms from the legal standards that traditional publishers are expected to meet. Except that, given FOSTA/SESTA, these online platforms would be held responsible for one type of post: third-party content facilitating sex trafficking or consensual sex work – the former being a crime, and the latter being legal, in different forms, in many countries (including the US and Canada, where jobs such as stripping have given birth to a lucrative night-time economy). Hailed by those who lobbied for it as a victory for sex trafficking victims, FOSTA/SESTA are exceptions drafted and approved in the United States, but they are being applied to the internet worldwide, having a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

The bills’ focus betrays a reflection of a US-based and sex negative mentality, as Kylie Jarrett, Susanna Paasonen and Ben Light identify in their book #NSFW: Sex, Humor, And Risk In Social Media. Social media 1

See ‘On Censorship’ by Rianna Walcott, published in Disegno #27.

moderation after FOSTA/SESTA is “puritan”, they write, and characterised by a “wariness, unease, and distaste towards sexual desires and acts deemed unclean and involving both the risk of punishment and the imperative for control”. Fuelling this, the argument runs, is a belief that sexuality is something to be feared, governed and avoided. This, for online sexuality researcher Katrin Tiideberg, blends with moral panics about children’s safety, and with “any resonant anxieties or moral panics that may be dominating a particular moment in time.”

Just like previous moral panics about print media, television or pornography, the ability to find sex on the internet is the next big invention resulting in a push for censorship. As a result, sex work, which already suffers from lack of legitimisation and the attendant benefits of labour laws and protections, is being further stigmatised. It’s not just about the freedom to post ass; posting ass is both a form of expression and real work, and platforms fail to recognise this – having already reaped its profits.

Broad, flawed legislation inevitably affects platforms’ processes and designs, highlighting the weakness in social media companies self-defining as “platforms” in the first place. According to Tarleton Gillespie, a tech academic, the word “platform” is, mostly, a convenient shield for Big Tech. “‘[Platform]’,” he writes, “merely helps reveal the position that these intermediaries are trying to establish and the difficulty of doing so.” It is simultaneously generic enough to allow social media companies to paint themselves as tools that give the public a voice, to enable advertisers to reach bigger audiences, and to create spaces where users – and not the tech companies themselves – are responsible for the content they post. The word “platform” allows social media to appear virtuous and useful, all while shifting responsibility for any conflicts caused by users away from themselves. As Gillespie argues, “Whatever possible tension there is between being a ‘platform’ for empowering individual users and being a robust marketing ‘platform’ and being a ‘platform’ for major studio content is elided in the versatility of the term and the powerful appeal of the idea behind it. And the term is a valuable and persuasive token in legal environments, positing their service in a familiar metaphoric framework as merely the neutral provision of content, a vehicle for art rather than its producer or patron, where liability should fall to the users themselves.”

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Social media’s self-definition as “platforms”, has been obliterated by FOSTA/SESTA. The bills have forced them to become overly conservative in their censorship of nudity and sexuality to avoid being held responsible, fined and blamed for wrongdoing.

Sex trafficking – a crime with devastating human circumstances – needs to be fought, but it is striking that bills suchas FOSTA/SESTA also target consensual sex work. In their paper ‘Erased: The Impact of FOSTASESTA & the removal of Backpage’, the sex worker research collective Hacking/Hustling, led by Danielle Blunt and Ariel Wolf, write: “While the law has been lauded by its supporters, the communities that it directly impacts claim that it has increased their exposure to violence and left those who rely on sex work as their primary form of income without many of the tools they had used to keep themselves safe.”

Craigslist’ Erotic Services and Backpage were once a prime example of this new-found opportunity.

These user-driven listing sites alllowed communities to list their services, giving sex workers more control over their work environment and avoiding some of the dangers of street-based work, such as different forms of violence by clients and the police. Blunt and Wolf write that internet-based sex work through sites such as Backpage “has allowed workers to be more forthright in their advertising, negotiate costs and services prior to meeting and establish boundaries.” Studies have shown that when Craigslist Erotic Services opened in 2002, murders of women in the US decreased by over 17 per cent in the following years. Because of this, the economists Scott Cunningham, Gregory DeAngelo and John Tripp have argued that “ERS created an overwhelmingly safe environment for female prostitutes – perhaps the safest in history.”

Even if FOSTA/SESTA technically became law only after Backpage closed its “Adult Services” section in 2017 (stating, “the government has unconstitutionally censored this content”), supporters of the bills argue that the removal of Backpage would not have been possible without them. And yet, as of today, only one charge has ever been brought to court under FOSTA/ SESTA: a June 2020 case against Wilson Martono, the owner of cityxguide.com, alleging “promotion of prostitution and reckless disregard of sex trafficking”, in addition to racketeering and money laundering.

Meanwhile, the bills have worsened the conditions of the communities they claimed to be protecting: Hacking/Hustling found that after the bills were

signed, and sites such as Backpage were removed, sex workers began facing the same old problems: “Sex workers reported that after the removal of Backpage and post FOSTA/SESTA, they are having difficulties connecting with clients, and are reluctantly returning to working conditions where they have less autonomy (e.g., returning to work under a pimp or to a 9–5 that does not accommodate for their needs or disability),” the collective write. In threatening legal liability for the promotion of sex work, FOSTA/SESTA have thrown platforms into a spiral of self-protection, resulting in designs that are based on over-censorship to protect their income, affecting swathes of internet content and behaviours with it.

Specific platform designs create specific affordances, or possibilities for different types of action. A forum may allow users to interact through questions and answers; the “live” function on social media apps makes broadcasting to live audiences possible; hashtags connect people with shared interests, and so on. These affordances were at the heart of social media’s initial pitch: through these functions, they promised, you will reach more people than ever before and have the chance to make your voice heard through channels that don’t gate-keep like the mainstream media. Inevitably, restricting or changing these specific affordances therefore affects the communities that use them. If you share and/or engage with content related to nudity and sexuality on the Internet, this is how FOSTA/SESTA affected you, making life on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Tumblr grow increasingly void of sex.

In 2018, for instance, the Tumblr “porn ban” removed sexual communities, fandoms, and groups that had developed over a decade; shortly afterwards, Reddit removed escort and “sugar daddy” subreddits, depriving users of forums where they could discuss this type of work. Facebook banned female nipples, triggering global #FreeTheNipple protests that forced the company to allow images of nipples in the context of breastfeeding, or breasts post-mastectomy and at protests. In many of these occasions, generic notions about “wanting to keep communities safe” and “welcoming” all sorts of users – rather than a direct mention of FOSTA/SESTA – were the platform’s main justifications for removing nudity from their feeds.

“There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content,” said Tumblr’s CEO Jeff D’Onofrio in 2018. “We will leave it to them and 24

focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.” Nudity had to go elsewhere, but that “elsewhere” continued to shrink.

It was a slippery slope that affected my own subculture, which left me in a unique position to research it. During the second year of my PhD in cyber-criminology, which focused on online abuse and conspiracy theories on social media, rumours

This is how FOSTA/SESTA affected you, making life on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Tumblr grow increasingly void of sex. of Instagram’s censorship of nudity began circulating in my networks of pole dancers and sex workers.

It was early 2019, and the terms “shadowbanning” and “shadowban” had started to become bogeymen amongst the accounts I followed. Shadowbanning is a light censorship technique where platforms hide users’ content without notifying them. It can result in your account or your content being hidden from platforms’ main “Explore” or “For You” pages, drastically limiting users’ ability to grow and reach new audiences,and voiding the platforms’ pitch to not gate-keep views.

The shadowban became a Twitter conspiracy theory when Republicans claimed the platform was restricting their content. However, while official platform statistics have yet to be published, a quick Google search reveals swathes of stories that seem to reveal it is actually women and marginalised users on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok who bear the brunt of this sly moderation technique.

In 2019, shadowbanning became a realistic threat to me and my network. I was just starting to make my name as a pole dance blogger and a rookie performer, and the online pole dance community had become a huge support network as I got out of and healed from an abusive relationship. Not reaching new audiences meant missing out on teaching, performing and blogging opportunities and, importantly, it meant losing my support network and the tools (platforms

such as Instagram, where pole dancers connected through hashtags) through which I had learned the hobby that was increasingly becoming my job and my lifeline. That summer, I obtained an official apology from Instagram about the shadowbanning of pole dancing: “A number of hashtags, including #poledancenation and #polemaniabr, were blocked in error and have now been restored,” the platform claimed. “We apologise for the mistake. Over a billion people use Instagram every month, and operating at that size means mistakes are made – it is never our intention to silence members of our community.”

However, as of today, the situation hasn’t changed.

If anything, it has become worse, showing that limiting users’ views is actually one of the less damaging things that platforms can do to profiles.

Shadowbanning may be sneaky censorship, but it is nothing compared to outright de-platforming.

Throughout 2021, my Instagram account was deleted once, my TikTok four times. In both cases, I received no warnings from the platforms that this was about to happen. My Instagram profile was deleted after I posted a picture with my 92-year-old grandma, leaving me at a loss as to how this had infringed community guidelines. In both cases, I only managed to recover my accounts by using my contacts and getting platforms’ PR and policy departments involved.

Meanwhile, users who post nudity and sexuality are often deleted without warning like I was, but have no opportunity to communicate with platforms and find out whether they did, indeed, violate community guidelines or, as in my case, whether they had been deleted due to an automated moderation glitch.

Account deletions of this kind often happen as a result of flaws within the design of platforms’ moderation systems, and yet leave the user very little agency to appeal, or even to understand what’s going on and learn from their mistakes.

Moreover, platforms’ design doesn’t target all users equally. In a 2021 Brennan Center report, Ángel Díaz and Laura Hecht-Falella wrote that “[while] social media companies dress their content moderation policies in the language of human rights, their actions are largely driven by business priorities, the threat of government regulation, and outside pressure from the public and the mainstream media. As a result, the veneer of a rule-based system actually conceals a cascade of discretionary decisions. […] All too often, the viewpoints of communities of color, women, LGBTQ+

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communities, and religious minorities are at risk of over-enforcement, while harms targeting them often remain unaddressed.”

Research from the Salty newsletter has also highlighted how sex workers, LGBTQIA+ users,

Mary L. Gray’s Ghost Work have highlighted, platforms employ online moderators based all over the world, who likely have little or no subcultural knowledge about the content they moderate, forcing them to make split-second decisions about swathes of posts for which they are often paid per action. Having to flick through thousands of abusive, violent or graphic posts a day isn’t only damaging towards moderators’ mental health, it also doesn’t encourage them to take time with specific decisions. And yet, when a handful of platforms hold the reigns of most online content and online spaces, most users are moderated through the same approach.

OnlyFans’ move to ban explicit content revealed the driving forces behind the shrinking spaces for online nudity, showing how powerful lobbies can influence not just the law and Big Banking, but platform designs, too. Internet platforms are quick to make their money on the back of sex workers, but begin diversifying their audiences and trying to de-platform sex once growth with the general public becomes a possibility. OnlyFans’ move to censor explicit content does not seem so out of place when you consider that the platform had been attempting to diversify its user base for a while, welcoming Cardi B, RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars winner Shea Coulee, and a variety of more “vanilla” influencers to show that the company did more than porn, prominently reposting these users’ content on its main feeds.

However, while something such as MasterCard’s decision to withdraw its payment services from PornHub in late 2020 received little attention from mainstream news, the attempted OnlyFans ban suddenly saw sex workers’ voices appear in articles.

Through journalistic investigations and interviews with sex workers, the groups and campaigns behind these decisions were revealed: namely National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) and Exodus Cry, which backed the recent #Traffickinghub campaign to shut down PornHub. As the journalist Chris Stokel-Walker wrote for Wired in 2021, “Exodus Cry, which reportedly has linksto the International House of Prayer Kansas City, a hugely powerful American evangelical Christian ministry, lobbies businesses and politicians to crack down on porn.

It does so as part of a twin-pronged goal: one noble, one less so. It presents itself as trying to mitigate the risks of sex trafficking, which should be applauded, but also seeks to use that as a method to halt all porn.”

While censorship of marginalised communities is rife, celebrities profiting from risqué content that would get a sex worker banned are left to “break the internet”. people of colour, religious minorities and activist organisations tend to bear the brunt of platforms’ moderation. “Compared to other marginalized respondents,” they wrote, “sex workers are most likely to report being censored in general.” Yet, while censorship of marginalised communities is rife, celebrities posting and profiting from risqué content and similar posts that would get a sex worker’s account banned are left to “break the Internet”. Facebook and Instagram are a case in point, as revealed in a recent Wall Street Journal investigation by Jeff Horwitz, who found that the conglomerate has “whitelisted” a set of high-profile accounts so as to ensure that they do not face heavy moderation. Quoting a 2019 internal review of Facebook’s whitelisting, Horwitz noted that the company acknowledged that “[we] are not actually doing what we say we do publicly[…] Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

Because hosting even the most remotely sexual content can be seen as a violation of FOSTA/SESTA, and may therefore result in expensive fines or legal procedures, platforms’ moderation of nudity and sex is rushed, automated and uninformed, leaving those who post it as the ultimate scapegoats in the war against online harms. As Netflix documentaries such as The Cleaners and books such as Siddharth Suri and 26

The illustrations accompanying this article were created by Exotic Cancer, a digital artist whose work on Instagram has been affected by account deletion and shadowbanning.

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Under the guise of fighting abuse, exploitation and sex trafficking, these groups – the same ones who lobbied for the approval of FOSTA/SESTA, gaining media traction by pitching themselves as ethical organisations that fight against online abuse and the non-consensual sharing of sexual images – want all sex off the internet. As part of this, however, they seem to have little interest in helping abuse survivors, so much so that they have been accused of saving and sharing child sexual abuse material by high-profile trafficking survivors who initially worked with them.

One of them, Rose Kalemba, tweeted: “At first, the anti-trafficking movement felt like a lifeline. Hardly anyone had ever cared about what I went through before. But it quickly became yet another thing that would traumatize me.” In a post condemning the main advocates behind the #TraffickingHub campaign, Kalemba wrote: “You cannot uplift some survivors by oppressing others. You don’t protect children by punishing sex workers, many of whom are just trying to feed their own children. & you don’t spread awareness about exploitation by watching, storing & posting videos of someone being assaulted. You don’t cause harm in the name of survivors, harm that we’ve begged you not to perpetuate & have said we don’t co-sign, & then blame us by screaming ‘it was all for you! We saved you!’ & then running with the money you made off of our pain & suffering.”

The OnlyFans story dominated the news agenda for about a week before the company’s U-turn, highlighting the fact that online porn is still the platform’s main source of income. Despite the story’s brief shelf-life, however, it wasn’t only a watershed moment for online sex workers, who had relied on OnlyFans throughout Covid-19 lockdowns having already been de-platformed by nearly every other social network during a pandemic that had already closed down their offline workplaces. It was also a very avoidable public relations shambles, with mixed messages and a general carelessness that did the company no favours, making many of its customers jump ship despite its last-minute U-turn.

In September 2021, Wired reported on the adult content creator Neville Sun, who had chosen to leave OnlyFans in favour of launching his own platform, NVS.video. “My heart was broken already,” he told Wired’s Lydia Morrish. “I don’t know if they will eventually or temporarily ban adult content creators. Next year it might happen again.”

Rather than the specificities of OnlyFans, however, it’s the general trend towards ridding internet spaces of nudity and sexuality that should stand as a stark warning. FOSTA/SESTA have forced platforms to not only look out for their advertisers’ interests, but mainly to protect themselves by over-censoring to avoid being seen as breaking the law. This has created an environment of “design by fear”, moderating quickly and without context – all the while failing to protect sex workers, creators and, as shown by Kalemba’s story, potentially even the trafficking survivors who the joint bill aims to protect. Now that swathes of business transactions, information sharing and just plain living happen online, we can no longer afford this: the world deserves better platform design that isn’t enforced by (and which doesn’t enrich) only a handful of companies, affecting the lives and livelihoods of millions of users worldwide. E N D

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Opening 9.12.21

6 pm Atrium [Lichthof]

10.12.21 11.12.21 12.12.21

12 – 6 pm

Opening Days 6.1.22

11 am – 6 pm

HfG Karlsruhe /////// Lorenzstraße 15, 76135 Karlsruhe 3G status is required!

Fitting Photos Words Sophie Tolhurst

On 11 September 2017, in a room in Yorkshire, designer Matty Bovan is photographing himself wearing different assemblages of textiles.

They are not-quite garments, rich in colour and texture and shaped into various silhouettes, waxing and waning in their recognisability as clothes.

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“I have always taken a lot – I must have thousands and thousands of photos.

They’re something I enjoy, but they’re also important for characters and shapes.”

—Matty Bovan

A top is made of knitted panels pieced together, seemingly unfinished and still with the contrasting cast-on waste yarn, which is used to start off on a knitting machine, but usually discarded later.

When Bovan took those photographs, he was five days away from his spring/summer 2018 show at London Fashion Week. These are fitting photos for that show, and the textiles they document are the final garments’ nascent forms. You may not be familiar with what fitting photos are, but you’ll immediately realise that they aren’t the kind of high-productionvalue fashion photography usually seen in magazines or across online platforms. These photos have a different format, quality, and purpose, used by the studio to document work in progress. “I have always taken a lot – I must have thousands and thousands of photographs,” Bovan tells me. “They’re something I enjoy, but they’re also important for me to realise characters and shapes.”

Fittings are a necessary part of fashion design; there is only so much you can do without a human body. Even when working with a standard shape, a change of fabric or an added detail or finishing can derail things. Of course, there is the tailor’s dummy (or dress form, or stand): a mannequin made for designing rather than displaying, 32

featuring a linen covering that allows fabric to be pinned to it. It’s a well-crafted, valuable tool, but also has its limitations: for one thing, they don’t typically come with arms (although these can be purchased separately, and the leading UK manufacturer Kennett & Lindsell now makes attachable heads). The mannequin is less malleable than the human body, and in its solidity leaves much of the garment untested: will the garment hold a breast securely, will the seam hold its line, or twist at the hips?

Designers all have their own ways of working.

Some drape from a roll of fabric, others take apart vintage garments, or else collage directly to the body with found objects or photocopy mock-ups. This process isn’t always legible in the finished garment, but it can be discerned in the fitting photo. Who the model for these images is also varies. Some designers work with the same fitting model for years, perhaps chosen for their ideal proportions, or because they function as muse, effortlessly corralling fledgling ideas into the designer’s vision. Others, such as Bovan, use themselves.

Fitting photographs are typically kept in-studio, and are infrequently published in any form. “They’re mostly pinned onto a board and I study them,” says Bovan, which is what makes his recent decision to display a number of his photographs on billboards across Manchester and Sheffield in the north of England unusual. The billboards are a project with Jack Arts, an organisation that seeks to promote the arts in urban spaces, and they show 20 fitting photos taken from 10 seasons of Bovan’s work. These are images that, he explained in a statement released alongside the project, “just happened at that time, with no thought of them ever being shown like this, and that allows them a certain freedom and sense of their own identity.” Not leaving them entirely as found images, Bovan has designed the billboard displays themselves. He has arranged the images and added his logo, as well as including QR codes that link to a related installation at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s (YSP) Bothy Gallery, Boomerang, in which visitors are invited to try on a number of Bovan’s creations. “This whole project is really about challenging your own self image,” he says.

Some of the photos seem purely documentarian, although they are often accessorised post-capture with computer-drawn squiggles: a heart, an X, an imaginary lasso pooling at Bovan’s feet. Others create narratives

Billboard images by Jonny Myatt, courtesy of Jack Arts; fashion images from Matty Bovan’s spring/summer 2022 collection by Ruth Hogben.

In one photo, a red and white intarsia knit hangs from Bovan’s waist, something between a skirt and a jumper worn upside down, the irregular hem dropping, like its arms, about his knees. Various side-on shots show experiments with bursts of tulle; another outfit features a quilted and appliquéd breastplate of sorts, laced-up down one side through oversized eyelets.

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“Louise Wilson told me to document my outfit every day on a self-timer, and this is how I have worked ever since.”

—Matty Bovan

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for Bovan’s world through make-up, styling, and evocative, performative poses. These are less like a standard fitting photo and more like the images found in his various side projects, which offer him creative release and allow him to test out ideas: zines such as 2018’s NEED4MEAD, or the footballthemed BOVAN Butterfly FC, which featured screenprinted football jersey T-shirts. “[L]ike all humans I have a lot of different emotions inside of me, and sometimes they come out in this way, sometimes they don’t,” Bovan tells me. The fittings are where “I learn about the character for that collection,” he says.

In trying on different shapes and bringing in different materials, these characters mature and come to life.

If you compare these fitting photos to the final catwalk images, it is clear that some of the garments’ form has already been decided: the materials, their arrangement, the silhouette. But other elements are still in flux, perhaps unfinished or yet to be added. If you came across these images, you might be unconvinced by what you see, but they represent a crucial moment in the designs’ formation. The fitting photo provides a chance to stop and reflect; the photos can be lined up together, collaged, drawn on, details scaled-up or else repeated in Adobe Photoshop. But looking back through my own – I’ve amassed thousands of these from working as a fashion designer myself, all different according to the studios I’ve been in – they are alive with far more. They document the action of design – the moments where the clothing is made or destroyed, as well as the atmosphere and actions around it. Sometimes a level of discomfort in the participants is palpable: the model, scared to move for the abundance of pins close to their skin; the trepidatious assistant poised just out of shot, about to be asked to cut into a garment, all the while hoping that they have interpreted their boss’s instruction correctly; the glint in the eye of the production manager, not only registering the possibility that their work may be about to be destroyed, but also a beautifully made piece of clothing that they perhaps hoped to gift to a relative or friend.

Fitting photos sometimes hint at the lack of glamour behind fashion, so often presented as the glossiest of design industries. From couture salons to cold warehouse studios, fittings are known for their long and tiring days: hard work for the unflinching models as well as for the designers. In writing this essay, I was reminded of the specific manner of

passing pins that they require. Trying to fish them out, two at a time and right-end-first from an angry haystack of needles, and then guiding them to the busy (too busy to look) hands of the senior designer, all without pricking their fingers (and temper). I feel amused – and perhaps vindicated – by an anecdote from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s studio, retold in Mary Blume’s 2013 biography of the couturier, The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, His World, which echoes this. “[We] passed the pins,” Blume reports one designer explaining, “they had to be passed a certain way and we couldn’t pass them fast enough”. Here, the pin-passer in question just happens to be Hubert de Givenchy, speaking shortly after setting up his own eponymous house.

As Givenchy continues, he conjures the sense of awe around the fit, comparing the humble pin to the surgeon’s knife. “[We] could see the woman starting to straighten up. It was wonderful to see, little by little, and just with pins, the body rebalance itself.

It was plastic surgery to the highest degree.”

Returning to Bovan’s photos, there is less of this rarefied atmosphere conjured by Givenchy, and instead a backdrop of domesticity – green carpet, panelled wardrobe doors. It is, in fact, the Yorkshire house of his late grandmother, from which he still works. For Bovan, whose work is inspired by his own style, family, and local area, this link to his personal life is fitting.

“All these aspects are deep rooted in myself and my work, so it’s natural they come out,” he explains. In interviews he frequently mentions how his grandmother and mother inspired him, both for their glamour and their creative skills. The former taught him how to crochet, while the latter made things around the house throughout his childhood and now creates the accessories for his collections. But it wasn’t until Bovan passed through Central Saint Martins’ (CSM) Fashion MA that course leader Louise Wilson prompted him to connect the clothes that he made for himself with a wider fashion practice. When tasked with formally designing, he “just couldn’t see it,” he explains to me, and it was Wilson who planted the seed of using himself as his own fitting model. “[She] told me to document my outfit every day on a self timer, and this is really how I have worked ever since.”

Not that there is anything quotidian about Bovan’s work. The “granny crochet” and blown-up family photos in his spring/summer 2022 collection take his familial history and twist it into something altogether more

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surreal, while Bovan’s own otherworldly look – with ever changing combinations of pastel-hued hair and bright make-up on an alternately moustachioed or clean-shaven face – means that he easily inhabits his garments, shapeshifting in and out of character.

As a teenager he discovered the artist Cindy Sherman, who uses her own image as a base from which to

since childhood. “The YSP is pretty close to where I grew up,” he says, “and for me it made total sense to have all this beautiful sculpture and art amongst the vast beautiful Yorkshire landscape.” The intention of both Boomerang and the billboards, he says, is to encourage creativity in his area, something which he has previously pursued through frequent public workshops and teaching at local universities. “I imagine myself as a teenager in the North,” Bovan says of his billboards. “I would have definitely never seen anything like this, especially not in that context.” He explains that presenting different aspects of his work – fitting photos, zines, sketches – can challenge assumptions of what a designer is and does, as well as ideas of how creativity can be expressed. “It’s good to challenge peoples idea of fashion, art and British creativity in particular,” he says.

Like the billboards, Boomerang is not a typical cultural encounter. It was created to offer the public an opportunity to try on and play with Bovan’s clothing, but participants were required to have smartphones locked away before engaging with the installation.

“This was the starting point,” he says, “no phones and no cameras.” It may be strange for a project about fitting photos to end with a disavowal of the manner in which most people engage with photography, but Bovan says that he wanted to remove the temptation for participants to post pictures straight to social media.

“Over recent years I have been fascinated with the idea of cultural capital,” he says. “More specifically how people attend art galleries and spaces to just take a photo for their social media and leave, posting the image pretty much instantly to use it as a badge of worth or status symbol.” Participants knew that Boomerang was still being documented, just by a photographer hidden behind a two-way mirror, with the images to be later compiled into a zine. “Zines for me are an important creative release,” says Bovan.

“I can just have fun and explore ideas I would never explore in my mainline collections. It’s a very instinctual way of working, collaborating, or reusing photos.”

Boomerang included a small number of archive pieces, but was predominantly built around custommade new garments that could be worn over clothes.

These garments, like those in the fitting photos, are unfinished. Bovan likens them to musicians’ demos – still open-ended, or mere sketches, but though which he could invite people into the process. He hoped that participants, denied the “instant gratification” of posting

“I imagine myself as a teenager in the North.

I would definitely never have seen anything like this.”

—Matty Bovan

create “self-portraits” of a vast array of luridly rendered personas. “And it made total sense to me that we all have these characters inside us,” Bovan says. A career trajectory such as his – passing through CSM, the mentorship scheme of Fashion East and sponsorship from BFC Newgen, and onto winning two awards at the 2021 Woolmark Prize (with a combined prize money of $300,000 AUD) – could easily have become a story of leaving behind a regional town for international acclaim. But Bovan continues to live and work in Yorkshire, and remains invested in the area. He is drawn to ideas and tales of Englishness, whether Horatio Nelson or football culture, as well as the city of York’s chequered history. “The medieval, the Tudor, the Roman, the Viking; it’s romantic and cruel at the same time,” he told Jack Arts. But, as he explains to me, it is an Englishness that is evolving. He highlights his grandfather’s emigration from former Yugoslavia, adding, “I understand Englishness [as] more of an abstract concept that I like to pull and stretch into my own world.” Like one of his inspirations, Vivienne Westwood, with whom his work shares common elements, Bovan embraces British traditions and tropes, but joyfully works to turn them on their head.

“I love that England has all these different aspects blended into it,” he says. “We need that to move forward and progress.”

Bovan’s billboards are explicitly rooted in the North, with their connected installation, Boomerang, taking place at a cultural venue that Bovan has visited 38

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to social media, would instead “think, make instinctual decisions, have fun, feel something and explore their own sense of identity, and ultimately their own sense of memory”. Nevertheless, he says that he was taken aback by people’s willingness to experiment and the emotional involvement in doing so. “I was shocked how nearly everyone went in full throttle, experimenting with their own image multiple times in their sessions,” he says. “It was a bigger success than I could imagine, and the space felt so special and magical almost, so personal and private. I felt privileged.”

As Bovan’s assessment of the magic of the installation suggests, there is something enchanting about the fitting process. Certainly, I have long been fascinated by the fitting photo. I remember my excitement on discovering a section of them in the 2009 book, Prada: Creativity, Modernity, Innovation, which gives an unusual degree of insight into the workings of the brand through behind-the-scenes imagery: skilled hands holding shoe lasts or passing fabric through a machine, as well as photographs of the elaborate show spaces designed in collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and OMA/AMO. But most thrilling to me were the fitting photos. These are unpolished, taken at various locations around the design studio, with boxes, samples and prints strewn about as people work in the background. In each image the model is wearing, or sometimes holding, a mix of garments and approximations of them: samples, some pinned and cut to shape; found materials, such as a green swathe of plastic netting; or print-outs of detail or pattern, Xeroxed to the desired scale. There are also non-fashion items of clothing – rubber galoshes, wellington boots – caught in the process of becoming fashion. Believing, at this point, may be difficult.

Sometimes the photos show only a mess of parts, a promise written in a broken language of materials and clothing, each with its own associations – military surplus, fisherman, 80s, girlish – but dislocated such that all meaning becomes slippery. The character is coming to life, but is only on the cusp of doing so, and this loads the photos with a tension: there’s a risk that in making the garment real that poetry will be lost, accidentally designed or commercially smoothed away. A certain bulk removed, or a more precarious joining solidified.

For Bovan, the making of fashion and the exploring of identity are processes that are entwined. In both there is a fragility, an unselfconsciousness at risk

of being shot down – including by self-censure – but what Boomerang showed, where he asked participants to trust and see the results later, is that given space, something new is able to take root. Similarly, in Bovan’s fitting photos, and to a certain extent in his finished garments, he doesn’t feel the need to smooth his garments’ edges or rationalise their more thrilling excesses. He keeps their volumes – leg-of-mutton sleeves, a top like a ship’s sail, panniers with added pleats – and allows them to speak. Any tension, held in place, bubbles over into excitement. In recent years, more fashion designers have begun to share their fitting photos on social media, but the garments they reveal tend to be late-stage and mostly finished, lacking the openness of those in Prada’s or Bovan’s photos. They are telling, not showing; nothing is at stake, nor is there a way in.

Fashion has a specific intimacy as a design form.

It takes ideas – colours, shapes, associations, memories – and tests how a body, in such close proximity, fits within them. I think of one billboard, where Bovan adopts a wide-legged stance, limbs stretching out the fabric in a fashion that reminds me of the dancer Martha Graham’s 1930s performance Lamentation, in which her movements were defined – both emphasised and limited – by the tubular garment of stretch fabric that she wore. I mention this because of the forces clearly at play between body and garment in Graham’s work, but there are less obvious tensions to be found too. Design cannot grow without remembering, testing and reflecting. This is visible in both Bovan’s work, thought, and openness to the public – but also the fitting photograph in general: both a stillness, of shapes respected and documented, as well as the opportunity, and difficulty, of finding yourself searching for something new. E N D

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Guiding you towards a sustainable choice.

Learn everything you need to know about sustainable American hardwoods in our free 100 page guide available from Americahardwood.orgDisegno

Inverted Grounds; Tethered Geographies Words Oorvi Sharma Photographs Oorvi Sharma and Tushar Verma

Section through Skurbuchan Khar in Skurbuchan, Ladakh (illustration: John Harrison).

In 2019, the Government of India made two major changes to the nation’s constitution: it amended Article 370 and abrogated Article 35A, dissolving the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories. Prior to these changes, Article 370 had accorded Jammu and Kashmir a constitution and legislative authority, while Article 35A granted special rights to permanent residents of the state, including employment and property.

The government’s unprecedented and unilateral move to amend the constitution will indelibly alter socio-political relationships and urban development in the region.

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Of the two new territories created through the changes, one bears the name of the former state, while the other is Ladakh: a bucolic and resource-rich region that abuts the country’s disputed borders with Pakistan and China on the Tibetan plateau. Historically, India’s central government has provided special protections for Ladakh’s population, deeming its idiosyncratic socioeconomic and political identity in need of safeguarding.

The constitutional reform is likely to be profoundly experienced in Ladakh’s built environment, which is now vulnerable to rapid urbanisation and national interests. The political changes have accelerated development proposals in the region, where advice from local conservationists and scholars is being overlooked in the pursuit of political power, capital and economic growth to support an expanding middle class. The demands for infrastructure and the national interests that are now pressuring the region threaten Ladakhis’ venerable construction wisdom with hightech homogeneity.

Resistance toward external investment has attracted a broad range of academic, economic and political stakeholders; efforts to implement the reinterpreted knowledge of indigenous Ladakhi structures and ways of living may help to maintain autonomy of regulation by the region’s historical patrons. Ladakh exhibits a strong regional identity – characterised by inaccessible mountain areas, fuel and material limitations – and sensitivity to population change. These elements, among others, have resulted in paths to urbanisation that are markedly different from those in lowland areas or more “Western” settings. Most importantly, there exists in Ladakh a tradition of human and ecological interdependence – a generational ideology of environmental maintenance that must be neither overlooked nor overtaken. In terms of the constitutional revision, the most significant change that Ladakhis may experience is alienation from their previous dominion over matters of land ownership.

As a result, planned urbanisation in Ladakh contrasts with pre-existing construction ecologies, which resist recognition as “urban”. The region’s pastoral and agrarian counterparts to its largest city and co-capital Leh1 are often not designed by planning professionals or the state, and the means and methods of urban aggregation should remain controlled by 1

This article specifically focuses on Leh, but the territory’s joint district of Kargil also urgently requires care.

small and local private and political entities. The situation in Ladakh, while culturally unique, reflects a wider global debate about prosperity derived from development. For whom are its benefits intended and how can exogenous investment be harnessed while still preserving indigenous forms of governance and management that sustain ancient knowledge of ecological stewardship?

Silk Route Islands Historically, the liminal position of Ladakh was its raison d’être. Much has been written about how the territory was a conduit for the formidable trade routes that crossed the Himalayas, connecting India and Tibet to central Asia. These routes, found amidst the highest mountain chains in the world, cultivated a seasonal convergence of political, religious and economic connections to which Ladakh contributed labour – porters as well as beasts of burden. Due to its tethered but isolated geography, Ladakh became an intersection of the Islamic and Buddhist worlds, and of Tibetan and Indic cultures; as a corollary, the Ladakhi people adapted to external influences while maintaining their own identity and autonomy.

Prior to their conquest in the 1840s by the Dogras, then the rulers of Kashmir, Ladakh was an independent kingdom that had been governed by a line of hereditary rulers. The region was thus profoundly heterogeneous, especially in the Kashmir Valley, which was predominantly Muslim and Ladakh Buddhist, while the Jammu region exhibited a Hindu majority. Jammu and Kashmir merged with India in 1947 under the Indian Independence Act, which partitioned British India into independent India and Pakistan. As a result, Ladakh’s geopolitical terrain was irrevocably transformed by the tightening and subsequent closure of its international borders with China, Tibet and Pakistan. This process eventually shuttered the region’s strategic commercial networks.

Jammu and Kashmir’s designation as an integral part of India, as established through the 1947 Instrument of Accession with India, was formally reinforced by evolutionary, legal affirmations in the form of Article 1, Article 370 and Article 35A in the Constitution of India.

Through this shift of governance, Ladakh transformed from a peripheral area of the Dogra kingdom to part of the frontier of the Indian nation. As a result, Ladakh was subject to the administrative control of Jammu and Kashmir, which chose to retain an independent constitutional structure that allowed for autonomy

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in decision-making regarding internal affairs, with the exception of foreign policy, defence and communications (all of which remained under the purview of India’s central government).

Ladakh was the biggest of Jammu and Kashmir’s constituent regions in terms of area but the smallest in terms of population, and this asymmetry created uneven Ladakhi representation in state-led politik.

A shifting framework of political alignments created demands – largely for regional autonomy – that were directed toward the central government and the state, as noted by Martijn van Beek in his 1998 paper ‘True Patriots: Justifying Autonomy for Ladakh’. The Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) was the primary lobbyist and, while its precise political aspirations may remain a point of contention, van Beek describes how the group’s struggle for sovereignty was incrementally achieved. The result of one such process of political manoeuvring and agitation was the Ladakhis’ gradual success in establishing a status of Scheduled Tribes through Schedule 6(a) of the Indian constitution, which provided new protections and economic opportunities to a majority of Ladakh’s indigenous peoples.2 Ladakh, however, has not yet received designation as a “Scheduled Area under Schedule 6(a)” which remains, to many, a more important step towards local governance. This would allow the region to benefit from special legal protections for indigenous land rights.

initially dedicated to supporting the region’s vast network of defence and military encampments is now being used to connect a constellation of villages with asphalted roads and steel bridges.

These developments may seem progressive for a previously isolated region, but the unfettered invitation to foreign investment may have long-term effects that benefit tourists,the military and others at the expense of Ladakh’s environment, its people’s autonomy and their customs.

Ladakh’s new political reality offers the possibility of elevated autonomy but with an almost-certain commensurate rise in temptation from neoliberal market models that are designed to benefit investors and developers. As a result, the burgeoning future of the region’s built environment will stand as an informal referendum on whether or not heightened sovereignty and increased investment can strengthen the political, economic, social and spiritual structures of Ladakhi society, while still preserving the traditional wisdom that has heretofore safeguarded the region’s ecologically interdependent construction practices.

Indigenous Ladakhi Building Habitable areas in Ladakh were traditionally settled for soil fertility and proximity to sustainable sources of water, such as melting glaciers or snow fields. As a result of the constraints of climate, terrain, and altitude, a range of demographic groups with varying traits emerged. A pastoral nomadism developed in the higher terrain, and a subsistence agrarian economy flourished in the more fertile lowlands. Climatic forces thus engendered, in each of these areas, a unique ecological equilibrium of habitation.

In many ways, Ladakh is a sedimentary paradise, due to a convergence of the Himalayan orogen, numerous lakes and the valleys of the Indus, Zanskar, Shyok and Suru rivers. Even the barren plateaus and badlands that can be found between its green bursts of cultivated valleys exhibit a diversity of rich soils.

The clay-rich, lacustrine “moonlands” of Lamayuru and the friable red and white sediment of Basgo, are some examples of this regional expression.

Where these regions are inhabited, their soils are often compacted into massive structures that bear the ornament of their sediment. These buildings are typically constructed with little financial or ecological cost, while also thermally adapting and regulating habitable spaces to the region’s microclimatic forces.

Ancient Borders and Modern Politics The new union territory designation will precipitate a shift in the urbanisation of Leh, which has, since 1974, already undergone transformations resulting from the impacts of tourism, a growing population, endemic water stress, increased regional mobility, changing family structures, waning dependence on agriculture as a mode of subsistence, reliance on imported goods, and a boom in loan-driven investment capacities. These shifts have accorded some groups a record rise in personal wealth and standards of living, especially in the lowland areas around Leh, where political power is concentrated. In tandem, planned infrastructural development that was 2

Schedule 6(a) of the Indian Constitution provides greater powers to indigenous peoples (termed “Scheduled Tribes”). As noted by Charisma M.S. Kundan in her article ‘Ladakh, Another Tibet?’, the Constitution of India currently recognises more than 97 per cent of Ladakhis as Scheduled Tribes.

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The present-day expanse of Leh (looking north), axially aligned to the historic caravan route serving the Khardung La pass (top-of-photo), which connected Leh to Central Asia, on the Silk Route.

Photoessay

Soil composition historically precipitated two primary building techniques in Ladakh: rammed earth and sun-dried mud bricks, the latter of which is more prevalent. Bricks, sized 125x200x400mm, were traditionally made with soil, sand from the Indus, and chopped straw and yak dung. These bricks were almost exclusively unstabilised, meaning they were made without cement. Monolithic earthen walls were as thick as 750mm at their base, tapering to 600mm.

The mass of these walls, often supported by raw stone foundations, captured heat during the day, gradually warming interiors throughout the evening. Openings in earthen walls were small and strategic, surgically placed high in exterior walls to provide natural light where needed, while minimising unwanted heat transfer. The efficacy and cultural ubiquity of massive earth construction in Ladakh are referenced in a local proverb, shared by Tashi Namgial, a Ladakhi artist: “tsam shik lhung-char phog na, saa deyzam srantey cha chan” (“the more time-related weathering that is endured by the earth, the more it is strengthened)”.

Roofs were often built from soil spread over wood beams and protected with markalak, a Himalayan clay.

As noted by John Harrison, a conservation architect who has worked on a range of projects in Ladakhi villages and Leh through both local and foreign groups, markalak is “an off-white or light grey coloured clayey silt with a low sand content, rich in illite,” which comes from regions ranging from Shey to Basgo. Harrison’s drawings, one of the few foundations of documentation in the region, demonstrate why traditional Ladakhi roofs are typically flat because “the [roof] clay absorbs water and swells, holding moisture in the upper layer,” which dries quickly in Ladakh’s dry climate. In the summer, the roofs are used to support an array of domestic tasks, most notably the drying of crops.

Buddhist households commemorate the symbolic highest point of the house by installing colourful, ornate prayer flags. At times, these roofs are punctured in the centre by the smoke holes (tokskya) of winter kitchens (rgyamthong). The roof parapet (chharlen), is usually built from mud-brick or stone and is layered with external cladding that uses locally grown willow sticks (talu) or extra feed in the form of brushwood from local bushes (bursts) or dry grass (yagzes).

Wood has historically been scarce and expensive, and thus used selectively in Ladakhi construction.

Furthermore, it was commonly worked and dressed by hand, which required time and skill. Wood was

employed structurally for floor joists (dungma), beams and posts (ka) on upper levels. Besides these structural uses, it was used liberally as ornament and for cladding at the parapet, or installed as wood chips between ceilings embellished with woven talu and earthen slabs in order to absorb excess dust.

Internal wooden decorative elements were either carved or painted, expressing derivations of Kashmiri or Tibetan influences. Wood was employed on the external faces of the building in the form of narrow cantilevered balconies or expressed wooden frames and lintels. Often, given the dry and cold climate of Ladakh, it is possible to salvage and reassemble old timber elements.

While clay, stone, and wood were used ubiquitously in the lowlands, the pastoral nomads living at higher elevations primarily inhabited tents sheathed in fabrics threaded from yak hair. Where possible, these were huddled together to form closeknit, labyrinthian networks that supported healthy social, thermal and resource-related interdependence.

Though architecturally divergent from the massive structures of the lowlands, these structures were no less intertwined with an ecologically reciprocal system of procurement and fabrication that was easily sustained.

A Fractured and “Modernised” Ladakh The increasingly incongruous relationship that has emerged between Ladakh’s indigenous methods of habitation and modern architectural palettes was preconditioned by the promotion of architectural modernism that engulfed India when the country emerged from colonialism. The epistemic and ethical challenges of post-colonialism became intertwined with modernist urban planning theories, which reoriented the social and spatial dynamics of the city toward an industrial economy. Development paradigms were often equated with Western models, such as those praised by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who insisted that India catch up with the West.3 These principles produced a split between elite nations and their subaltern counterparts, as well as between elites and subalterns within national boundaries.4 3

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For information on Nehru’s aspirations for a new, modern India, see Romi Khosla’s ‘The New Metropolis: Nehru and the Aftermath’, published in Social Scientist, Volume 43, 2015.

As the first foundations of a post-colonial Indian working class were developed, a subset of rural subalterns remained cocooned within an autonomous domain of cultural life and political action. Imported planning ideologies were used to devise modern Indian architecture and urban areas constructed by mechanised production; to this day, superimposed modernism continues as a predominant paradigm in design and development discourse throughout the country, and this underlying aspiration maintains a tabula rasa mentality with respect to local customs.

Despite the decline of modernism, the rise and fall of post-modernity, and, eventually, the emergence of digital design and fabrication, the production of architecture in India has remained rooted in the same standards that sparked the modern movement.

In Ladakh, this has heightened a tension between cultural homogenisation and heterogenisation, where an accelerated copying of “Western” approaches and foreign subsidies challenges the preservation of heritage and creative potential in the Ladakhi landscape.

Ladakh’s ecologically and socially interwoven methods of extraction and construction began to splinter in the 1980s and 1990s, as noted by van Beek and John Bray (both prolific scholars of the region), with the proliferation of boundary walls intended to mark property. These new walls, which were often built as a response to increased migrant labour and a perceived heightened need for security, introduced private thresholds to a landscape that was previously unmarked and open. The high barriers, which often included barbed wire and gates, stood where there had once been only earth, or low-lying stone walls (built so as not to obstruct the movement of local wildlife). This pattern of demarcation occurred in tandem with an agenda for modernisation, hastening the development of tourist facilities, military encampments and other structures that were all painted with the modern palette of glass, steel and concrete.

While remote settlements, geographically isolated from this development, resisted the mass importation of foreign materials (mostly as a practical rather than ideological matter), the built environments of many 4

The definition of “subaltern” most applicable to the region can be found in David Arnold’s essay ‘Subaltern Streets: India, 1870-1947’ (2019): “Today, India’s subalterns are seen to belong essentially to communities not primarily identified with urban society, including landless laborers, and adivasis or tribals.”

villages were significantly altered by the proliferation of concrete. As a direct result, earthen walls and roofs were frequently replaced by synthetic and hybrid counterparts (typically brick constructions supported by reinforced-concrete frames), ranging between 150mm and 250mm thick. As demonstrated the world over, concrete can be poured relatively quickly and uniformly, but significant concessions are made in

To this day, superimposed modernism continues as a predominant paradigm in design and development discourse throughout India. cement-based construction as opposed to clay-based assembly. Chief among these, as Paul Jaquin notes in ‘Clay: The First Cement’, is the increased embodied energy in concrete, as well as the inferior ability of cement-based structures to regulate humidity and the thermal condition of enclosed spaces, which are better managed by clay-based assemblies.

Perhaps the most alarming indicator of this material shift coincided with the 2016 renovation of Leh’s main market: a project that was executed for its “beautification”. In the process, the architectural heritage and cultural history of the market was relinquished as a range of landmarks, domestic earthen buildings, pedestrian passages and local businesses were dispossessed and demolished.

They were replaced by a series of unfinished, concrete shells that were stacked and offset on either side of an axial pedestrian path. The cost of this project, ultimately, was unproductive indigenous upheaval and the loss of the Leh market’s genius loci.

However, this concern was not shared by the region’s administration, as noted in the District Commissioner’s praise for the project, as described in a 2013 article titled ‘Leh Beautification Project Worth Rs 217 Crores Inaugurated in Leh’, which was published in Reach Ladakh, a local newspaper: they deemed its success “incomparable in the history of Leh”.

Executed under the umbrella of the ‘Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small & Medium Towns’ (UIDSSMT, Ministry of Urban Development 2009), the beautification plan is what one might call a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the region. In 2008,

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3

2

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A pastoral nomadism developed in the higher terrain, and a subsistence agrarian economy flourished in the more fertile lowlands.

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1 Ancestral properties in Ladakh have largely retained their integrity, remaining intact and opposing the property fragmentation-byinheritance models exhibited in other regions hosting rapid urbanisation.

2 Colourful, ornate prayer flags are commonly installed on the roofs of local households across the region (image: Tushar Verma).

3 A narrow, covered pedestrian pathway in Leh’s Old Town (image: Tushar Verma).

4 The Indus river is a primary connector of agricultural and transportation networks. Pictured here is Stakna Monastery, which is located southeast of Leh (image: Tushar Verma).

5 A narrow alleyway in Leh’s old town, abutted by two properties that have been restored by LOTI, THF, and other partners.

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Leh’s old town, known locally as Kharyog, was declared a slum under the Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) programme, an extension of the national Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).

The RAY and JNNURM engines are enabled by regional councils and public-works departments with the self-proclaimed mission of providing “equitable” development, access to infrastructure and distribution of services. The predicament is outlined in Judith Müller and Juliane Dame’s 2016 journal article ‘Small Town, Great Expectations: Urbanization and Beautification in Leh’ in which they note RAY’s conviction that, “the old town historic area [in Leh] has gross infrastructure deficiencies and poor housing conditions as a result of which it is in a slum-like state, despite being historic in nature on the lines of religious towns in other parts of India.” The insistence on progress has created an intrinsic insensitivity within RAY’s conservation and restoration paradigms, which local experts Tashi Morup and Rigzin Chodon described as, “introduced without taking into account the terrain of the land and heritage value of the town”. These notions have since reverberated, giving form to a range of incoherent development patterns, which were most recently reflected in the demolition of two historical Manikhang stupas in Leh’s old town.

The imposition of neoliberal incentives and investments is holistically understood through cost comparisons (both financial and ecological) between indigenous Ladakhi construction techniques and contemporary development methods. Subsidies and supply models have decreased the cost of cement, encouraging the proliferation of concrete construction, while earthen buildings face issues of perceived material scarcity, rising costs of labour and technical immaturity.

Local timber from willow and poplar trees faces similar neglect and expense due to the overwhelming supply chains of imported timber from other states. These manipulated markets and politics of procurement, especially in the Himalayan region, also deny a wide subset of the population affordable access to local wood. The favouring of imported models and materials at the expense of local customs creates a value imbalance where concrete buildings assume higher property values than earthen and wooden structures.

Technologically deterministic solutions are still employed by national urban development engines, which operate with outdated agendas based on a capitalist system that manifests “weakly and

unevenly”, as observed by Rajnayaran Chandavarkar in his book History, Culture and the Indian City (2009).

But subsidised, foreign models fail to acknowledge what Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet noted when in conversation for Dialogues II (1980), that “tools always presuppose a machine, and the machine is always social before it is technical.” The social significance of construction industries invariably demonstrates how external models mirror colonial patterns of harmful ecological extraction and profit return at the expense of local customs. If unchecked, this type of urbanisation would indelibly and adversely alter the landscape of Ladakh. An alternate approach for the region might eschew urban homogeneity in favour of grassroots projects and regional construction ecologies that preserve historical knowledge and prioritise adaptability, rather than subjugation to foreign investment and increased development.

Revitalised Forecasts from the Community Alternative futures for Ladakh’s built environment have been and are being promoted by many different community organisations. Van Beek has described how Ladakh has historically experimented with the legal enforcement of cultural traditions, from mandates that schoolchildren and government officials don “traditional dress” to strict building codes, including specific regulations such as bans on sheet-metal roofs.

But these efforts were often short-lived and laws are not as natural as community-driven efforts, in which vernacular techniques are more readily accepted when they are included in process demonstrations that sustain skills and traditions within the local workforce. Grassroots efforts do not categorically overcome alternative cost or time incentives promoted by imported models, but vernacular methods have been successfully demonstrated in parts of Old Leh and select villages, where local organisations promote the conservation and adaptation of older structures to incorporate contemporary uses – particularly where historic structures can be marketed with higher touristic value.

The Ladakh Ecological Development Group (LEDeG)5 and the Students’ Educational and Cultural 5

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LEDeG was established by Helena Norberg-Hodge, author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh but is now an autonomous, local group. Norberg-Hodge has worked extensively in Ladakh and is a leading proponent of localisation through Local Futures, an NGO that is active in the region.

Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), which is led by Sonam Wangchuk, promote hybrid models of rehabilitation, invention, and construction. Spanning scales, their experiments have ranged from Wangchuk’s monumental ice-stupas – artificial glaciers that store winter water to contend with the regional crises of water paucity and groundwater contamination – to solar thermal solutions and dry-composting toilets. Of these, the most widespread model is the LEDeG trombe wall, which is a 225mm black-painted and glass-covered, south-facing, mud-brick wall that absorbs solar radiation during the day and releases it to cooler interior spaces. The trombe wall’s structure is supplemented by a “sandwich” of earth walls with

An alternative approach for Ladakh might eschew urban homogeneity in favour of grassroots projects and regional construction ecologies.

150mm compacted earth on the inside, followed by 150mm of insulation. The inimitable capabilities of the trombe wall system to regulate and create comfortable interior thermal conditions during the winter has led to its widespread adoption.

LEDeG has recently been developing sanitation structures using Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks (CSEB) which are unfired mud-bricks fabricated on site by compressing mixtures of soil, sand, stabiliser and water into moulds.6 These blocks – capable of providing stability up to four storeys without concrete frames – allow LEDeG to experiment with a range of building methods that might have the potential to engage local construction techniques. However, unlike the trombe wall, CSEBs entail higher embodied energy and diminished recyclability, and impose an insidious image of “advanced” development over indigenous methods through the use of a stabiliser (cement).

This practice differs from those employed by some of the most renowned earthen designers and contractors, most notably the Austrian builder Martin Rauch, who advocates for the omission of cement in earthen

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LEDeG relies on manually operated Auram 3000 presses from the Auroville Earth Institute and engineering firm Eureka.

construction, which, in an ideal case, as he described in 2017, is “formed from regional materials, processed on site, and potentially reused without loss of quality or returned directly to the earth at the end of a building’s life cycle”. The hybrid techniques being used by LEDeG nevertheless demonstrate that the composition of clay-based and cement-based binders exist on a spectrum of practices, all of which possess both benefits and compromises in ecological procurement, respect toward ancient traditions, and the ability to meet the requirements of a specific site and project.

Among the most progressive conservation ventures in Leh is the restoration of its Munshi and Gyaoo houses (whose original constructions can be traced back to the early-17th century) as a headquarters for the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO). The Munshi and Gyaoo houses were part of a cluster of two communities, skyanos tukchu and gog-sum tukchu, which hosted the abodes of prominent aristocrats and merchants. The restoration was spearheaded by Monisha Ahmed of LAMO and Harrison, who, along with his team, executed the project over a period of five years from 2006 to 2010. During this period, construction was restricted to the months between May and September (which is typical for the region, due to extreme weather conditions that trigger an annual exodus of migrant workers and shutter most vehicular paths). Despite the labour and climatic restrictions, the project was accomplished with a commitment to the revitalisation of Ladakh’s construction heritage.

In contrast to the restoration work that has been undertaken in Ladakh before and since this project, Harrison describes how its “building elements – walls, beams, pillars, and windows – were to be repaired in situ rather than replaced or rebuilt. Where rebuilding was necessary, materials were salvaged and reused.

Intact bricks were relaid; broken bricks remixed and remoulded.” Their process, which drew the attention of locals and tourists alike, launched a much-needed dialogue regarding construction integrity and conservation thought that exceeds the outdated notions of preservation codified by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), an institution which remains adherent to the 1964 Venice Charter, an outmoded set of guidelines for the conservation and restoration of historic buildings.7 The team “wanted to demonstrate that generous, positive spaces for a 20th-century public use could be

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A Lamayuru local guides his dzo along the village’s main thoroughfare. Lamayuru, located in western Ladakh, is best known for its monastery (far-left-of-photo) and a unique landscape that results from lacustrine deposits from the Cenozoic era.

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created in a ‘traditional’ building,” while also employing Doda masons and utilising historic Ladakhi building methods, materials and details.

The processes and ethics of conservation demonstrated by LAMO were entirely different from the Leh palace conservation, a comprehensive overhaul that was undertaken in incremental phases from 1982 by ASI; its failure to respect material cultures resulted in a landmarked relic that is effectively isolated and hollow outside of ticketed tourism. Rahul Mehrotra, architect and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has previously criticised this institution’s perfunctory process of “stabilizing monuments to ensure their continued survival rather than examining, questioning or even discussing ways in which their temporary relevance can be reinterpreted or reinvented”.

Amongst other issues, for example, timber beams, sills, lintels and other elements from the palace that were salvageable were instead replaced by imported counterparts. In doing so, the ASI’s intervention may have embalmed a heritage building and cost the structure the chance to evolve and adapt its significance beyond just “continued survival”.

Following the conservation of the Munshi and Gyaoo houses and other revitalisation projects, many residents, including local artists and architects, have recently occupied older, previously neglected city clusters, just south of Kharyog. While this trend risks gentrification, it also holds potential for revitalisation.

Some examples include the artist Tashi Namgial, a painter, who works out of his studio space in Old Leh, and Chimat Dorje, who runs his sculpture studio just up the hill. Both Namgial and Dorje have signed 10-year leases with their buildings’ owners, who are the hereditary patrons of these properties that have been preserved for over a century, and proceeded to renovate the spaces.8 Namgial executed his project independently of institutional partners and collaborated with a team of local Doda 7

masons, his grandfather (a former mason) and migrant labourers in a process that followed the resourceful remixing logic of Harrison’s work for LAMO. On the other hand, Dorje sought the expertise of the Leh Old Town Initiative (LOTI), a conservation programme that is led by the Tibet Heritage Fund (THF),9 which subsidises restoration efforts for local owners and

There is a risk of Ladakhi citizens being administered solutions on the basis of a reductive, interpreted, homogenous nationality. residents and has contributed extensively to the restoration of domestic properties and landmarks in Leh’s old town, as evidenced by various placards.

These projects define the relationship between indigenous and contemporary construction models as one of tenuous coexistence, characterised by slow, disparate (although promising) efforts and projects that seldom generate enough economic traction to incentivise local participation. Nevertheless, these ventures expose residents to hybrid models of renovation and rehabilitation that defend local customs and respond to regional ecologies, maintaining morality in the practice of architecture. While these restoration efforts may lack the technical maturity developed in natural building globally, Rauch has previously argued that this need not diminish the value of projects such as these: “the really political aspect of pure earth building is that it can be implemented anywhere fully independently of lobbies, share prices, and industrial price controls, with simple craftsmanship being used to construct high-quality, ecologically appropriate buildings.” Ultimately, however, the various grassroots projects and organisations that currently practice and advocate for regional construction ecologies and localised models of growth, require stronger support from local

In his 2007 article ‘Conservation and Change: Questions for Conservation Education in Urban India’, Rahul Mehrotra criticises ineffective “institutions such as the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), which were established in the colonial period, propagate the European view codified in many of the earlier charters and in particular the Venice Charter,” where, “the articles (of the Venice Charter) direct the restorer to sharply distinguish, on the surface of the monument where he is intervening, the elements of the past from those of the present”.

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This is representative of a local ethic to retain the integrity of ancestral properties, which stands in strong opposition to the property fragmentation-by-inheritance models that other regions experiencing rapid urbanisation largely exhibit.

THF is currently led by Pimpim de Azevedo and Yutaka Hirako.

Similar conservation projects have also been completed regionally by the Achi Association.

governance to contend with foreign investment and the development models multiplying in Ladakh’s newfound autonomy.

Towards Non-modern Governance The governance structures that have created the current conditions in Ladakh reflect the situation of other Indian cities and villages, which today face unaffordability, environmental decay, material erosion, inequitable access to resources and confrontations between hegemonic and subaltern cultures. These trends warn national and local decision-makers of the “fragility of utopian projections of an earlier modernity,” as described by Dilip Gaonkar in his 1999 book Alternative Modernities. Other scholars, such as Ravi Sundaram, have similarly chronicled this historical paradigm as a “pirate”, “recycled”, or “alternate” modernity, ideas that are productively mirrored in the philosopher Bruno Latour’s argument in We Have Never Been Modern that “we are not emerging from an obscure past that confused natures and cultures in order to arrive at a future in which the two poles will finally separate cleanly owing to the continual revolution of the present. We have never plunged into a homogenous and planetary flow arriving either from the future or from the depths of time.” Latour’s interpretation of an ever-present non-modern world is a useful theorisation of a construction and governance ecology that has been – and in India’s case should remain – intimately interdependent between environmental and cultural foundations of the country, its ecosystems and its peoples.

Speculation on new or revitalised non-modern governance provides a possible method of heritage preservation in the wake of increased neoliberal investments that are defined by their rapacious ecological consumption and capital accumulation.

In Ladakh, there exists a structure of concentric governance authorities, in which the union territory (UT) government now forms the outermost layer.

To date, however, the UT government’s attitude toward local stakeholder groups and the regional council has been characterised by a low level of participation,1o in which there is a risk of Ladakhi citizens being administered solutions on the basis of what Sundaram has termed a reductive, interpreted “homogeneous nationality”. An unfortunate reality of this complex governance model means that regional planning policies may lack local expertise.

The Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (LAHDC), established in 1994 by the LBA’s campaign, is second to the UT government in the concentric political model. Today, the Leh and Kargil districts (Buddhist-majority and Islamic-majority, respectively) have their own autonomous hill councils, through which Ladakhis elect representatives who oversee rural development, health, education and property.

The entire Leh region is divided into 12 smaller sectors, each of which has its own representative councillor.

Even the hill councils, however, seem removed from granular movements, as shown by their inefficiencies in advocating for thoughtful environmental, planning, and economic policies.11 In this realm of bureaucratic inefficiency, how might “institution building” measures that affect development regulation be converted into a political narrative of self-governance? And how might this be put into action in a region with economically and electorally marginalised areas that require a revitalisation of local subsistence, sustenance and substance? These are questions that have long preoccupied urban-planning scholars: the social theorist Murray Bookchin aptly argued in his 1995 book From Urbanization to Cities that “our chances for a natural and ecological society are much better in this [local and citizen-oriented] approach than in those that ride on centralized entities and bureaucratic apparatuses.”

The innermost layer in the concentric governance structure is embedded within the region’s most remote villages, where the vast majority of Ladakhis reside.

While some villages are home to fewer than 30 families, others host upwards of 150 households.

The manageability implied by these small population 10 “To recapitulate and enlarge upon the argument already made,” writes Rajni Kothari in State Against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance (1989), “it is a context where the engines of growth are in decline, the organized working class is not growing, the process of marginalization is spreading, technology is turning anti-people, development has become an instrument of the privileged class, and the State has lost its role as an agent of transformation, or even as a mediator, in the affairs of civil society.

It is a context of massive centralization of power and resources, centralization that does not stop at the national Centre either and makes the nation state itself an abject onlooker and a client of a global world order’.”

11 Alex Jensen of Local Futures has noted the prolific issuing of building permits for hospitality and tourism-based activities, with little regard for projective planning and the establishment of adequate standards. The result of this is a series of crises relating to sanitation-mismanagement, toxic groundwater and unhindered development, among others.

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6 The “lunar” landscape of Lamayuru results from lacustrine deposits from the Cenozoic era. These soils are part of traditional Ladakhi building material culture.

7 The dramatic scenery of the region is characterised by temperamental climatic shifts and colorful bands of diverse sediments. Pictured is the Namgyal Tsemo Gompa in central Leh (image: Tushar Verma).

8 Clustered, earthen dwellings in Thiksey village, as seen from Thiksey Monastery.

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bundles introduces a means of effective decisionmaking that prioritises the agenda of village residents.

These populations operate as dual citizens: they participate in regional and national elections, as well as partake in the consumer economy from afar, but simultaneously retain a distinctly local affiliation.

Revisiting the issue of grassroots activism here is thus productive, not simply as a form of resistance to “the state [which] has lost its role as an agent of transformation, or even as a mediator, in the affairs of civil society,” as political theorist Rajni Kothari described it, but as an active and creative process that ensures progressive growth and the preservation of local customs by design, rather than by default.

Local governance in Ladakh has historically been undermined by discrimination, and disparities between local and national politics. The perspectives of outsiders who entered Ladakh as teachers and patrons rendered a view of Ladakh as an “underdeveloped” society, lowering the self-esteem of locals and compromising the status of local governance. These opinions were reiterated by Nehru in the Amrita Bazar Patrika newspaper on 8 July 1949, where he commented that “in Ladakh you are backward and unless you learn and train yourselves you cannot run the affairs of your country.”12 With this view so brazenly expressed by the new nation’s leader, how was Ladakh to overcome prejudice and assert itself?

Despite decades of misrepresentation, young Ladakhis have sought to overcome these connotations and attain greater control of their ancestral customs and regional affairs, and have often been persuaded to forfeit a spiritual and anthropocentric worldview in favour of capitalist materialism. This disparity is reminiscent of Gandhi’s proposed revolution by the charkha (spinning wheel) and his contention that “the salvation of India is impossible without the salvation of the villages.” The advantages of a localised governance structure are further contextualised by the principles of decentralised, human-scale economies promoted by E.F. Schumacher, who claimed that “economics of scale, which may well have been a 19th-century truth, can be shown to be a 20thcentury myth.” Ignoring this perspective – and overlooking local resources in favour of carbon12 In his 1998 article ‘Hill Councils, Development, and Democracy: Assumptions and Experiences from Ladakh’, Martijn van Beek elaborates further on such political perceptions of Ladakh.

intensive material cultures, design paradigms, climate conditioning systems and aspirations for “modern” ways of living – provides only superficial sustenance, ultimately damaging an existing wealth of ecology and tradition.

In contemporary discourse, however, the rhetoric of villages is at times located as a site of alterity to the modern world. Proposals for alternative economic development, revised governance and rescaled expectations of modern life, especially in contexts parched of economic stimulation, typically receive pushback. At a time when other Indian towns are witnessing prosperity tethered to employment at industrial scales, propositions to operate in smaller, tangible ways are anathema to a public seeking to expand the economic basis of its existence. However, in the case of Ladakh, this apparent contradiction may form the basis of a new logic, as described by Kothari, which is “meant to rejuvenate the State and to make it once again an instrument of liberation from ineffective structures (both traditional and modern)”.

The strength of the Indian model is that remote villages are already equipped with unique and direct governing entities that represent their citizens at a local level. The Panchayati Raj Act of 1989 enabled self-sustaining modes of political and legal management at a village scale through the establishment of halqa panchayats (village councils) and inter-village adalat (court) systems. This intricate framework comprises groups of elected members, overseen by an elected leader (the sarpanch), who preside over matters of governance within individual villages or groups of small populations. The panchayat model in Ladakh co-exists with an inherited, Buddhist system of local governance, where the goba (elected village treasurers and representatives) and membars (patrons of intravillage geographical divisions) are additional members in the system.13 These political representatives, ranging from LAHDC councillors to the intra-village panchayat members, also perform duties within the realm of development, conflict-resolution and social relations.

Thus, from a socio-political perspective, there are multiple checks and balances in place for even the smallest of communities. Therein lies a potential model to revive and operationalise effective modes of localised decision-making about regulation.

13 This applies to villages with a Buddhist majority in the Leh district.

The panchayat model in Kargil district most likely differs.

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The argument to protect and restore the salience of place and identity through rigorous democratisation at a granular level has seen success elsewhere in India.

The 1973 Chipko movement in Uttarakhand, which was a landmark revolution in national forest conservation efforts, and the 2015 creation of protected, wildlife conservation zones in Bera, Rajasthan, both obliged adversarial actors to mitigate or terminate activities that were complicit in environmental damage and indigenous upheaval. These are both examples of peoples’ movements paving the way for greater corporate and bureaucratic accountability, in turn becoming forms of advocacy for productive, localised modernity and reinforcing the effectiveness of a transscalar approach. In order to shepherd a future in symbiosis with local ecologies, can Ladakhis pull off similar transformations through grassroots movements encoded in architecture (the manifestation of cultural aspirations and the enabling economic climate)?

The mountainous landscape of Ladakh presents just as many challenges as it does opportunities. During the cold, dry winter, the quiet lives of Ladakhis go mostly unnoticed by outsiders. Yet, when the city of Leh is abustle during summer, hosting an inconceivably vast population of visitors, it is difficult not to be subsumed by the chatter of international exchange (people, goods, ideas) and wonder whether or not Leh has already been irrevocably, culturally transformed by tourism and broader forces. The recent change of union territory status will escalate these external forces and indelibly alter outside investment, the preservation or neglect of cultural heritage, and the fabric of urban development in Ladakh. The region’s governance models and community organisations must be supported if they are to withstand the forthcoming market pressures and investment opportunities that might otherwise threaten the ancient wisdom and ecological balance of Ladakh’s built environment. It is an endeavour that needs to be undertaken posthaste. Ladakh is too precious a land not to try. E N D Many thanks to Alex Jensen, Dushyant Dave, Chimat Dorje, John Bray, John Harrison, Martijn van Beek, Monisha Ahmed and Tashi Namgial for sharing their wisdom about Ladakh and the issues at hand.

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A Arnold, David. ‘Subaltern Streets: India, 1870–1947’ In Subaltern Geographies (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019).

B Bray, John. ‘Introduction: Locating Ladakhi History’ in Ladakhi Histories: Local and Regional Perspectives (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005).

Bookchin, Murray. From Urbanization to Cities: Toward a New Politics of Citizenship (London: Cassell, 1995).

C Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. History, Culture and the Indian City (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

D Deleuze, Giles, et al. Dialogues II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

F Ferrari, Edoardo Paolo. High Altitude Houses. Vernacular Architecture of Ladakh (Firenze: Didapress, 2018).

G Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar (ed.).

Alternative Modernities (2nd ed.) (Durham; London: Duke University Press Books, 2001).

H Harrison, John. The LAMO Centre: Restoration and Adaptive Reuse in Leh Old Town (Leh: LAMO and Stawa, 2017).

J Jaquin, Paul.‘Clay: The First Cement’ in New Carbon Architecture: Building to Cool the Climate, edited by Bruce King (Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 2018).

Jina, Prem Singh. ‘Impact of Tourism on the Ecology of the Ladakhi Himalayas’ in Ladakh Studies, International Association For Ladakh Studies, 30 (2013).

M Mehrotra, Rahul. ‘Conservation and Change: Questions for Conservation Education in Urban India’ in Built Environment (1978-), 33 (3) (2007).

Müller, Judith, et al. ‘Small Town, Great Expectations: Urbanization and Beautification in Leh’ in South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 14 (2016).

P Pirie, Fernanda. ‘Secular Morality, Village Law, and Buddhism in Tibetan Societies’ in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12 (1) (2006).

S Schumacher, E. F.. Small is Beautiful (New York; San Francisco; London: Harper & Row, 1975).

Singh, Harjit. ‘Ecology and Development in High Altitude Ladakh: A Conflicting Paradigm’ in Ladakh Studies, International Association For Ladakh Studies, 30 (2013).

Sundaram, Ravi. ‘Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New Globalisation’ in Economic and Political Weekly, 39 (1) (2004).

R Rauch, Martin, et al. Martin Rauch: Refined Earth, Construction & Design with Rammed Earth (Munich: Detail – Institut für Internationale ArchitekturDokumentation, 2017).

Rizvi, Janet. Ladakh: Crossroads of High Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).

V Van Beek, Martijn. ‘Hill Councils, Development, and Democracy: Assumptions and Experiences from Ladakh’ in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political (1999).

Van Beek, Martijn. ‘True Patriots: Justifying Autonomy for Ladakh’ in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 18 (1998).

K Khosla, Romi. ‘The New Metropolis: Nehru and the Aftermath’ in Social Scientist, 43 (3/4) (2015).

Kothari, Rajni. State Against Democracy (New York: New Horizons Press, 1988).

Kundan, C. M. S. “Ladakh, Another Tibet?”

In Tibet Foundation Newsletter, 75 (2020).

L Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Plants ≠ Objects Could challenging the way that design treats plants help to shift our perceptions of materials, value, resources and equity?

Introduction Laura Drouet and Olivier Lacrouts Photographs Overmind 60

“What work is required for us to be able to register the being-ness of these creatures with whom we co-create our worlds?” —Natasha Myers

We imagined Plant Fever as a space of reflection, and an opportunity to ask questions. A lot of design work with plants is political, presenting designers as agents for change: the micro-shifts that they can bring about are highly relevant when dealing with natural resources, plants and other beings. Also, as Dossofiorito pointed out to us during that initial 2017 interview, when we interact with plants, we have to learn their language. We need to absorb their grammar and lexicon in order to be able to connect with them.

These two aspects – designers as political agents who give value to what they touch and designers as agents who build bridges with other species – are essential. Through Plant Fever, we have learned about a new generation of designers working on a small scale with communities – either human, plant or animal – and also interacting with biologists and philosophers to establish deeper interdisciplinary connections.

These ideas are essential if we are to build new futures based on mutual reliance.

At the end of both the exhibition and book is ‘The Manifesto of Phyto-centred Design’, a sevenpoint call for practitioners and the general public to establish a new sense of respect, responsibility and empathy for plants. The first point in the manifesto is critical: “Plants ≠ Objects”. To discuss this issue further, we convened a roundtable that would bring together designers from across disciplines and theorists from different fields to reflect on ways in which design might help to forge alternative relationships with plants.

Plant Fever was born out of a conversation. In our research and curatorial work, we try to cast light on hidden or neglected facts and actors, telling their stories and putting them in conversation with a wider and diverse audience. Back in 2017, Laura had just finished reading a few mind-opening books – such as Éloge de la plante by the French botanist Francis Hallé and Braiding Sweetgrass by the American professor Robin Wall Kimmerer – when we had the opportunity to interview Dossofiorito, the design studio of Livia Rossi and Gianluca Giabardo. We spoke about their practice and how it looks at other-than-humans from a design perspective, and that conversation sparked a question: are there other designers who are looking into plants as their source of inspiration, subject of study, or allies in conceiving new scenarios?

Thus began the research that went on to become Plant Fever, a book and exhibition produced and presented by the Belgian museum CID au GrandHornu in 2020, and which is currently on display in the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. There are two aspects that we wanted to target with the project.

The first is to challenge the idea that plants only constitute the background of our lives and exist for us to exploit – something that is embedded in our Western perspective on the duality between humans and what we call “nature”. We want to explore how, through design, we might be able to mend that separation and reconnect the two. The second point is to look at “plant blindness”, a term coined in the late 90s by the American botanists J.H. Wandersee and E.E. Schussler to describe a cognitive bias against plants and our failure to account for their importance as living beings. Through art and design, can we break down this idea of plants as invisible?

Early on in our investigation, we realised that looking at design from a vegetal point of view could highlight how Western culture has often established a relation of domination over plants and considered them as mere commodities. From a design perspective, or even from a social perspective, when we objectify something, we are in a position of power to change its destiny or form. An object is passive matter. In that sense, when we consider plants as objects or as a simple resource, we fail to understand their full nature and complexity. While conducting research, however, we encountered a number of designers who were questioning that relationship with plants, proposing different ways of relating to them.

The panel is: Laura Drouet and Olivier Lacrouts are Studio d-o-t-s, a nomadic research-led studio active in editorial and curatorial production. The studio’s investigations focus on alternative social dynamics and experimental design perspectives.

Fernando Laposse is a designer whose work centres on plant fibres and their social, political, economic and environmental entanglements: his Totomoxtle project1 creates marquetry from the husks of native corn grown in Tonahuixtla, Mexico, as a way of empowering an indigenous community to regain control of these grains, and make a livelihood and profit from a new material.

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See ‘Design for a Rural Mexico’ by Martha Pskowski and Carlos Álvarez Montero, published in Disegno #22.

Natasha Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Canada’s York University and also director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory. She works with the concept of the planthropocene, which proposes ways of conspiring with plants and forming new reverential relationships with them, in contrast to the human-centric view of the anthropocene.

Livia Rossi and Gianluca Giabardo are the founders of Dossofiorito, a design practice active between 2012 and 2018 in Verona, Italy. Some of their work has focused on the human relationship with nature and, specifically, plants. Their Phytophiler project is a series of ceramic plant pots equipped with functional appendices, such as mirrors, magnifying glasses and climbing frameworks, which are designed to enhance human’s interest in and relationship with houseplants.

Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher and associate professor at Paris’s École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is the author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018), which argues for plants as occupying a position from which we should analyse all elements of life, and addresses philosophy’s historical lack of interest in plant life.

Ioana Man is an architect whose work focuses on the microbiology of the built environment, examining the ways in which all architecture is inhabited not just by humans but by other lifeforms too. She is also the design lead of Faber Futures, a design agency founded

by Natsai Audrey Chieza that works at the intersection of design, society and technology, and focuses on biologically derived materials. *** What does it mean to treat a plant as an object?

Natasha Myers Plants have been relegated to the

background of our lives: as a resource, there for the taking; as the substrate for our economies; and as the material fodder out of which we make our worlds.

But that way of addressing the world follows a deeply colonial form. One of the frameworks that I want to bring to this conversation is an understanding that to render beings as objects is a colonial project – a project grounded in dispossession and extraction.

We have to remember that colonial power is bound up in managing land and specifically managing plants – colonial powers continue to rework land and extract

value through plants. Plants are at the core of the engines of our economy today, and they fuel capitalism and adjacent economies. So, we have to consider these values that have been set in place through an extractive, violent regime that has rendered plants as objects, and also enslaved people in the process. We have to preface the question you are asking with the realisation that rendering plant as object and resource is also bound up with

“Design can help us reframe how we see the natural world, how we see plants, and how we see other organisms.” —Ioana Man the dehumanisation of people, with slavery, and a wide range of forms of enslavement. We have to realise that the split between nature and culture we seem to remain so caught up in is continually shored up through colonial power. So the beginning of the conversation, for me, is about de-tuning the colonial common sense that would have us talk about plants as natural resources. How can we start to engage with them as beings and what work would that require on our part? What work is required for us to be able to register the being-ness of these creatures with whom we cohabit the earth, and with whom we co-create our worlds?

Ioana Man Design can help us reframe how we see the natural world, how we see plants, and how we see other organisms. We tend to see them in isolation.

When working on projects on the microbiome of the built environment, I’m often asked, “What are the good microbes that we want in a building?” And there’s no such thing as a “good” microbe, right?

I wonder, when we think about a microbe, or a tree, or sugarcane, or any of these other organisms, how could we start to describe them not through what they do for us, but through what relationships they support – both ecologically and to do with human practices they impact?

Emanuele Coccia What interests me about plants is the fact that they have a way of being where forms are

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The images accompanying this roundtable were created by Overmind and commissioned by Studio d-o-t-s for Plant Fever. Towards a Phyto-centred

Design (Stichting Kunstboek & CID au Grand-Hornu, Belgium, 2020).

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produced in a much richer way than in the animal realm. Plants are, in a way, designers. If you think about trees, they’re very strange entities because they’re living beings that add parts to their body every year. In the case of most animals, we reach a form and then just grow within it. So trees are, in a way, always questioning the problem of form.

They have to decide which form to assume, every single year. They’re designers, perhaps in an even stronger sense than humans. Plants are also the

“If we’re discussing what designers should be doing with plants, I don’t see it as wrong to consider them as materials. That’s part of human nature.” —Fernando Laposse living beings that radically changed the atmosphere of our planet. They made this planet liveable and breathable, and are also responsible for the fact that sunlight, which is the main source of energy for all animals, is available for us in a practical form.

That’s why it is important to study plants.

Fernando Laposse There’s obviously this connotation of extractivism, which was turbocharged during the colonial time – an ambition to control and take everything as something to be possessed. Having worked for so long with an indigenous Mexican community, I’ve been looking at their relationship to maize, which is their totemic plant. But that’s almost a humanmade plant. You don’t have “wild” corn – it has been cultivated for thousands of years to reach its present form. So, I think that this question of dominating a plant or controlling and owning is not necessarily a colonial feeling. I think it’s a very big part of human nature. It’s about trying to utilise our intelligence and skills and observations to try and persuade plants towards helping us achieve what we want to. If we’re discussing what designers should be doing with plants nowadays, I don’t necessarily see it as wrong to consider them as materials, or to consider them as a commodity to be used, because

that’s part of human nature. Humans have done that since the inception of agriculture.

Livia Rossi I think that it is important, however, to try to develop a different approach to nature: in “progressoriented” societies such as ours, nature has traditionally been looked at as a set of exploitable resources. But in other cultures, especially in indigenous societies, nature has been perceived as a generous entity that offers us its gifts. This is not a subtle difference, because the notion of a gift implies reciprocity. In his work on this subject, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss claimed that gift-exchanging is strongly connected to the human capacity for establishing relationships and, therefore, creating social contexts. So, for me, the establishment of alternative, reciprocal attitudes towards nature is key to the development of a different perception of it and the role of humans within it.

I also believe that a more widespread understanding of plants is important in this process of establishing a different relationship with the vegetal world. For example, we often don’t consider plants as being properly alive because they appear motionless to us.

But of course they do move, they do change, and they grow in different ways depending on the situation they are in. We really need to let go of our speed and adopt a different timeframe to witness and participate in all of that. Through the Phytophiler and our other projects dedicated to plants, we were really trying to underline how “having” a houseplant is much more than showcasing a nice decorative element in a space.

It is a form of co-habitation that presents a great opportunity for approaching, understanding and caring for otherness, in a context like the home where we are more at ease, and therefore more open and welcoming towards this experience.

Fernando I think the issue is perhaps this supercolonialist view of, “Let’s just completely plunder plants.” Perhaps something to relearn or look at is to focus on our traditional communities worldwide, because these are people who still have a radically different philosophy of how to approach our relationship with plants by understanding the interconnections between us and them in a more fruitful way for both organisms. Something that I learned from working with an indigenous community for the past few years is the idea of inter-species design – where you as a designer are perhaps not just designing for the benefit of the designer, but saying, “Okay, how can we collaborate with plants to create

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improvements for the both of us?” That sometimes has to be done through the production of a material, because, ultimately, we have built our world on matter.

I think it is a little bit utopian or naïve to just assume that we can forget about that altogether. It’s more a question of, “Can we reframe it? Can we go back a few steps behind? And can we listen to the people who are still living in tune with that, to be able to move forward?” It’s about diversifying solutions, because so far, we are re-approaching the issues with a very Western mind. So, in my case, I’ve tried to not exclusively think about technology and new materials, but also about reviving or revitalising old systems that worked. And this is often through looking at traditional communities.

Emanuele I think we have to avoid this attitude that Western culture is necessarily an objectifying culture.

It’s a very neocolonialist attitude and it’s not something that I agree with. When we ask what it means to treat something as an object, it reminds me of the work of the anthropologist Alfred Gell, who showed that a huge part of our culture deals with objects in a very specific way – art. What we call art in Western society is a sort of animism, because within it we are relating to objects as if they were subjects. Even with objects, we can have different attitudes. When we say that something is an artwork, we recognise that this object exists in the same way as a subject exists. That’s the key, I think. It’s not a question of becoming different, or transforming the world, it’s about recognising that in the realm of objects, or even design, there is a special attitude whereby you create an object, but the object exists with subjective attributes or qualities.

That’s why, in my opinion, design and art play a huge role in an ecological crisis – they’re realms that are training people to have a different relationship to objects and to help them see that matter is not just matter, or not just a function. In a way, design is really the impossibility of letting matter exist just as matter, because the designer is obliged to give form a meaning.

So every piece of matter that is designed contains something that belongs not to matter, but to the mind. That’s why designers are so important.

Natasha It’s about relations [between things] – you can produce materials, but those materials are precious and charged with a different relationship. They’re experienced as a gift, not as an extraction. Yes, we can harvest and draw in these incredible gifts, as Livia is talking about, but if we’re relating to them

as gifts, then we have to reciprocate. One of the things that I would want to achieve is a reconfiguration of our understanding of the human – to understand that we are of plants and that we have been shaped by them. To begin with, they entrained our sensorium: they taught us how to taste, how to smell. They taught us about beauty, they taught us about aesthetic forms, inciting intoxication and exciting our pleasures.

“In a way, design is really the impossibility of letting matter exist just as matter, because the designer is obliged to give form a meaning.” —Emanuele Coccia If we start to recognise that we are of the plants, then the next step is asking how can we return that support?

So, one concept I’m working with is the indivisibility of plants and people, and beginning to recognise that our future hinges on their future. What can we do to support their thriving, so that they can help everybody live? This is the planthropocene – this recognition of indivisibility and this realisation that we need to be in a reverential relationship with plants. I’m also working with this concept of conspiracy, which means to get on the same side, but also means to breathe with.

If plants breathed us into being, how can we get on their side and support their thriving? Part of this process is really thinking about the human-plant relation[ship] – not dreaming of a world without humans so that plants can survive, but dreaming about a world of conspiracy, or co-constitution, or collaboration. That reconstitutes our relation to something that is less extractive. It’s less about designing for us, but about designing with and for other beings and designing for the relations that plants have set up in the world – precisely those that our practices tend to sever. I think design is a powerful place of reworking those relation[ship]s.

Ioana A lot of my thinking around these issues is to push back on the modernist exceptionalism of the designer as the figure who shapes how we live.

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And also the modernist obsession with control through cleanliness, exclusion and efficiency. So a lot of my work is to establish frameworks, tools and processes that allow for different kinds of outcomes. Some of what we do at Faber Futures is to think about what a design brief is actually for. Do we work on briefs for products or for a production system that can equitably support people and the planet? Is the architect’s brief to design buildings for profit? Or is the brief to design space for human-plant-microbiological interactions through gardening or foraging? What was striking about what both Natasha and Fernando were saying is this idea that we should maybe be writing briefs for processes and relationships. Looking at Fernando’s work, that’s kind of happening already. It feels like you’re writing the brief not for the artefact, but for the making with nature. It all goes back to, “What do we want to achieve in design?” Maybe we need to strive for things that are not profit or domination.

Emanuele It’s funny – when we walk down a street where there are 50 or 60 trees, nobody’s thinking, “This is actually quite a crowded place.” But if there were, I don’t know, 50 or 60 dogs, we would feel very differently. So there is a problem in acknowledging that plants are living: we consider them as a part of the visual landscape, and not as living beings. If we could start considering them as real subjects, that might change a lot. Once we start to acknowledge that plants and trees are alive, and that they have the same status as animals, everything changes. All this debate about vegetarianism and veganism, for instance, would change radically because you couldn’t say that you wanted to avoid eating living beings, but you also couldn’t stop eating them because you have to eat something. To be an animal means to acknowledge that the life you’re living comes from other living beings. You are, in a very literal sense, a reincarnation of other living beings.

Fernando It’s easy to explain my ideas to the people that I work with, the farmers, because they’re already a lot more empathetic and a lot more understanding. The bigger challenge is always, how do you explain them to more of an urban crowd? So, without getting super cheesy, I try to give a bit of human personality to the plant when I’m describing it. When we harvest agave, we wait until almost the end of the plant’s life. So when I’m talking about the agave, I talk about the end of their lives, when they do something incredibly poetic – they basically put all of their energy and all

of their sweetness into creating a 10m-long flower that is pollinated at night by bats. And so, right before they die, as one last act, they put all of their energy into copying themselves and making babies. When you frame life in that way, people start to think of themselves and their children. But the corn is a big challenge at the moment because I get looked up a lot by interior designers, who are interested in my work because of its ecological aspect. But as soon as we start to talk about the colours of the corn, they ask me about Pantones. “Give me all the RAL or Pantone codes of your material.” Which is impossible – it’s as if they were asking for the Pantones of people. I mean, it’s almost as wrong as that. I think that standardisation has become so prevalent, that sometimes you need to reflect on how ridiculous it is to expect that in a plant, because it would be equally ridiculous to expect that in a person.

Emanuele I have no problem with anthropomorphism in the sense that, firstly, it’s unavoidable, and secondly it’s necessary. When we say, as botany now does, that plants think, we are not just anthropomorphising plants, we are also vegetalising human beings – we are saying that thinking is something that is common to human beings and plants, and which is neither purely human nor purely vegetable. From this point of view, anthropomorphism is also a practice of dehumanising human beings and that’s interesting as a negation of human exceptionalism. From a biological point of view, one of the major consequences of the theory of evolution is the fact that every species is a patchwork of features from different species. Our own bodies give us access to a multi-species experience: in a sense, we are not purely human, but are already biodiverse.

Everything we have exists in every other species under another form.

Olivier Lacrouts We’ve been working on an organic farm here in the French Alps for the past month and a half, talking with the people who own the farm about the plants that live here. Those kinds of questions, “Are plants objects?” or “Is it difficult to explain that plants are alive?” do not really seem to apply here – they are probably only relevant for an urban population that is distanced from other-than-human beings. It’s that distance from where the materials we use come from that causes the problem. People who live closer to so-called nature have the vocabulary to express what these beings are. In Plant Fever, for instance, there’re two projects by the Latvian designer Sarmite Polakova

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called Pineskins and A Story About a Pine Tree, which examine the production of pine timber, comparing it to cattle breeding practices and showing us how we tend not to consider forests as living entities but as mere “factories to deliver wood”. In her research, Sarmite explores the potential of new relationships with pine trees. In common forestry operations, only the trunk of the tree is seen as useful material, for example, whereas the bark is extracted on-site in the forest and then just left there. In a series of drawings, Sarmite shows how the bark is almost like the skin of an animal – it’s a way of confronting the audience with the fact that the plant is a living being.

Laura Drouet We also featured a project by the Austrian designer Alexandra Fruhstorfer called Menu from the New Wild, which proposes eating certain plants and animals that have become invasive in Austria as an alternative to using poisonous substances – such as glyphosate or zinc phosphide – to get rid of them.

Many [visitors] expressed their reluctance and disgust at the idea of eating a raccoon or a turtle, claiming that it would be unethical; they were, however, not disturbed by the prospect of eating two plants, Japanese Knotweed and Himalayan Balsam. As a vegetarian I do understand their point, but it does say a lot about the distinction we create between animals and plants.

Emanuele But I don’t think our attention towards plants should be reduced to a moral level, because it’s more about an explosion in our knowledge of plants. The city, at least in its origin, was an association between human beings and vegetable beings – we built cities because we built gardens, and we took food from our gardens to support ourselves. Today, cities conceive of themselves more and more as monocultural entities, which is a huge problem, but not because of any lack of attention towards plants. The problem was the demographic explosion of the 1950s, when we quickly built cities because we had to host billions of people coming into them from the countryside and we just didn’t have time. The problem was haste. I think the reason that design is now looking at plants differently is because we know so much more about them. Botany has experienced a revolution in the last 40 or 50 years with the discovery of the importance of symbiosis to evolution, which means that cooperation is more important than predation or competition – this was the work of a biologist called Lynn Margulis. That means that plants may actually be more important

for our understanding of life on this planet than animals, because their life is not based on predation – botany has become so important for understanding life on a planetary scale. We should stop reducing everything to a moral movement and to a movement

“Paradoxically, another way to talk about plants’ importance is to speak about us – humans – and how much our life depends on them. ”—Laura Drouet of more respect, because much of it is also about the fact that we have discovered something amazing.

Laura Cultivating fascination towards plants by raising awareness of their poetic singularity and “powers”, such as Fernando pointed out with the example of agave, is one way for us all to understand that plants are more than objects or materials and that they have a design of their own – for instance, to multiply and spread. Paradoxically, another way to talk about the importance of plants is to speak about us – humans – and how much our life and that of many other beings depends on them. Being aware of this interdependence makes you change your mind on the vegetable realm.

Natasha Animals can, of course, look back at us and we can produce all kinds of affinities with such creatures.

It’s harder to do that with plants. But all beings rely on plants and we are held together as a planet by the plants. If you want to help bring back endangered animal species, you have to remember that it needs a whole world and that world is going to be made by plants in some way. You cannot save a creature if you’ve destroyed its land and its relations with plants.

The point that I’m trying to bring forward is that we all need plants. Environmental, climate and racial justice all hinge on healing people’s relationships with land and plants. Growing good relations with plants is a way of fostering plants’ relation[ship]s with all other beings. So instead of thinking, “Oh, we need some habitat to make sure that we’re saving the animals”

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“Animals can look back at us and we can produce all kinds of affinities with such creatures. It’s harder to do that with plants.”

—Natasha Myers

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– habitat is such a passive concept – what if we were to understand plants as the world-makers we need to heed? These are the creatures who terraformed these lands making them habitable for all the rest of us. This question becomes who is the “we” that

acknowledge this possibility to think together, be together, live together, and breathe together with “others”, we return to the idea of the garden. There are no “others”, there is only a plural “us”. I feel we should stop this polychotomy, which also exists in our languages, that divides humans from others – it only keeps reinforcing a perception of a separation that does not exist.

Natasha We need to figure out ways that we can conspire with plants if we are going to live on this planet well. So, precisely the kinds of deep work that can transform them from being objects to becoming beings who are worthy of our address. We should actually be learning design from them and so I’m interested in how the way we decide to relate to plants though design will decide the world that we live in, in the future.

Fernando A bit of a challenge as designers, is that we see plants as resources, but it’s very hard to get out of that now, because it demands a whole restructuring of our world. We’re in a hyper capitalist world, where you don’t have much counter-balance from an opposite ideology, so if you want to preserve something, you almost have to assign an economic value to it. The conundrum is that if you don’t assign an economic value to ecosystems, there’s no way of controlling them. Something I’m interested in at the moment is the fact that the traditional communities we’re dealing with don’t live in a vacuum: they’re still affected by economic chains and globalised markets.

So one challenge that designers have, and also a huge opportunity, is to look at how you could create parallel sources of revenue that allow you to not compete with these established ways of seeing everything as a resource. What we’re doing right now with the corn, for example, is looking at what we do with waste, which in our case is the grain because it has become the least profitable part of the plant. A square meter of our material is equivalent to a tonne and a half of grain, so it’s about seeing whether we can use that grain to feed the farmers growing it, and then create a new sub-economy that is in competition with the wider ravenous overproduction of corn. Perhaps one way forward is some sort of capitalist activism. That could be dangerous, but there may be a way of hacking that wider system, which is, unfortunately, almost impossible to operate outside of nowadays.

Olivier Yes. Probably one of the main challenges for designers such as you, who work closely with

“Design has been the backbone of capitalism.

In that sense, it is in a compromised position.

We have an original sin.”

—Gianluca Giabardo

matters? We need a “we” expansive enough to include all kinds of multispecies solidarities if we are going to be able to reckon with the enormity of the challenges that lie ahead. I think we have to reckon with what it is that plants are actually holding together for us.

To turn our attentions from animals to plants is to recognise the centrality of plants’ role in our planetary way of life.

Gianluca Giabardo I’ve been thinking about the role of design in all of this, because design has traditionally been an innovation and technology-focused discipline.

It has been the backbone of capitalism, consumption and industrialisation, and has enabled the extraction and exploitation of raw materials. In that sense, design is in a compromised position, which presents a big challenge for the discipline. So, how do we enable – or bring forward – a discussion where this idea of bridging and eliminating the separation between nature and culture is done through the work of design? As a discipline, we have an original sin that is hard to let go of. For this purpose, I really like the idea of conspiracy that Natasha brought up. I am exploring symbiotic conviviality in my doctoral research through the practice of natural fermented bread baking. In my understanding, which relies on the work of Lynn Margulis that Emanuele mentioned, symbiosis is a form of co-existing survival, while conviviality is both living with, and – as Ivan Illich proposed – individual freedom when it is realised in personal interdependence. I think that when we

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communities, is to create these sub-economies and maintain them at a small enough size. Because once you scale up production, even if you’re using leftovers, you risk establishing a new monoculture.

Staying small is thus part of your responsibility.

Fernando I completely agree, but staying small has also to do with the amount of added value that you can generate. In the case of what we’re doing, we can put such a markup on the material that we don’t feel the necessity to go and chop down half a mountain to plant corn. We’ve downscaled and the overall corn production of the village is a lot less than it used to be, but there is such a markup on this material that it’s allowing them to have a certain independence from this frenzy to overproduce. It’s about staying at a sustainable size, economically and environmentally.

Ioana You’re talking about a shared language that can communicate value and, under capitalism, that shared language is very often money. I wonder if there is an alternative way of regarding the living world and finding a different shared language. I navigate biotech on one side, and design and architecture on the other, which are both notoriously exclusive fields that talk in lingoes and abstract terms. The challenge with both is to find the stories and metaphors that open up what it is that we do to the real world. For instance, working with microbes in built environments is also my grandparents putting pots of milk on top of their cupboard, and the microbes in the room transforming those into yogurt. It’s this kind of knowledge that actually embodies the relationships that we have with plants, microorganisms, and the living world, and these real-life stories communicate different approaches to design and challenge the idea of who counts as the designer. You mentioned design’s original sin, Gianluca, but is that where design started? I know that’s one way of seeing the situation, but aren’t ancient fermentation vessels design? Aren’t permaculture strategies design? Maybe we’re just too limited in who counts as the designer and we should learn from all of these other designers who embody a lot of these values in their work.

Gianluca I totally agree with that, but there is this narrow view of design that is mainstream in many universities and which we’re educated in – or at least I was. When you were talking about the economies of the maize grain and husks, Fernando, it reminded me of this interview with the chef Dan Barber on [the BBC World Service show] The Food Chain. He was saying

that he was known and acclaimed for his bread, the grain for which was sourced from a nearby farmer.

So he felt that he was supporting local agriculture and economies. But when he went to visit the farm, he found out that the emmer wheat he was using was only a small fraction of the farm’s overall production: to get him the grains needed to bake his bread, the farmer had to rotate the field, and grow millet, barley and kidney beans as cover crops. So the chef realised that he needed to use all the produce that went into that rotation and then developed a menu around it.

This made me think that it’s crucial to find ways to think systemically about the implications that certain kinds of economies have on the ecosystem.

Natasha The question that I want to offer is, “What is your garden growing?” What are we growing in our homes; what are we growing outside of our homes; what are we growing in the design projects that are being dreamed up and funded today? Because we could be growing the apocalypse, right? We can grow capitalism really easily, we know how to do that, and the question I’m interested in provoking designers with right now is, “Can we design for a different future?” That means reckoning critically with all of the terms that capitalism served us. It would be easy to grow “sustainability”, which in many ways is about sustaining capitalist growth, but then that’s not helping. We have to recognise the ruse of sustainability rhetoric and re-think what kinds of ecologies we can build, which are relation[ship]s that don’t necessarily have extractive economic forms. That’s something that I’d love to have as a core of this new thinking from within design.

Gianluca I think that different futures have always been at the root of design. We want to design a different future, but thinking about who thinks what that future will be, is important. We have to first design spaces and modes for deliberation: how is this future going to be imagined and discussed and decided together?

Because otherwise, the role of the expert, of the designer, remains in the hands of the few, and will inevitably replicate problematic dynamics. E N D

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The Biodegradable Aphrodite Words Oli Stratford Photographs Theresa Marx

Apparently, you’re not meant to keep a lipstick for more than eight months. “And I never knew that,” says the designer Insiya Jafferjee, eyes widening behind her spectacles.

“Personally, I’ve never been a big beauty user, but beauty enthusiasts will throw a lipstick away after eight months. I mean, I had my lipstick for years.”

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Pellets of Shellworks’ Vivomer material, ready to be injection moulded.

Biodegradable packaging samples.

Packaging samples and material experiments created by the team.

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Well, eight months really doesn’t sound very long at all, which makes me suspect this whole thing could be a bit of a scam. You know, beauty’s equivalent of the Phoebus cartel, rigging the system to keep sales of Rouge Dior, Ruby Woo, and Black Honey Almost firmly in the pink. “I’ve heard it’s not meant to be good for your lips if you use it for longer than eight months,” explains Jafferjee. “Certain things dry out.” Now, I’m not sure whether those things are ingredients in the lipstick or else elements of your lips should you apply old product. Could out-of-date lipstick trigger an instant shrivelling? “So there is quite a bit of waste in that industry when you use the products correctly,” Jafferjee summarises. She is presumably unaware that I’m now solely concerned about my lips withering when touched by eight-month-old Pillow Talk.

Nevertheless, the waste she mentioned should probably be a concern too. Jafferjee tells me that, pre-pandemic, the global cosmetics industry produced an estimated 120bn units of packaging per year, the bulk of which is plastic. “Which, in terms of packaging, places it second behind the food industry,” adds her colleague Amir Afshar, who has just brewed a very good pot of coffee indeed, making expert use of a French press. He explains that coffee-making in the studio can be a competitive business and that they all have their own preferred methods. And while he admits to being a bit underwhelmed with his latest effort, I personally like a French press, enjoying both how manual and French it is, the former of which actually has some relevance to the issue at hand.

“At its base level, food packaging is a box with a lid,” explains Afshar, “but cosmetics packaging is much more complex, because you have mechanisms and systems.” Lipsticks roll up; creams pump out; coffee is pressed. This, I think, is a good point, and in a bid to join in with the conversation1 I explain that it had never occurred to me that lipstick even has packaging. The holder just sort of is the lipstick, I suggest, with the stick and container integrated in a fashion you simply don’t get in food, bar notable exceptions such as the Push Pop and the Calippo.

“Beauty has ways to dispense things that are between packaging and engineering,” agrees Afshar. “When you look at a pump, it’s made of around five different types of plastic, and there’s likely glass and metal in there too.” In the world of beauty, packaging is product.

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The long and short of this, Afshar and Jafferjee explain, is that a significant proportion of cosmetics packaging is sufficiently complex such that it cannot be readily handled by existing recycling streams. This, in turn, ought to pose questions over the effectiveness of prioritising recycling in combatting plastic waste.

“We would love everything to end up in exactly the right waste stream and if that was the case, recycling would be great,” says Afshar, “but the reality is that

“Recycled plastic is fabulous, but at the end of its life, the recycling system is still broken. All you’ve added is an additional step.”

—Amir Afshar

those systems are broken.” That isn’t particularly pessimistic either. According to a 2017 paper in the peer-reviewed Science Advances, only 9 per cent of the 6,300 metric tonnes of plastic waste estimated to have been produced up until 2015 has been recycled.

Seventy-nine per cent of this plastic waste has simply accumulated in landfill or the natural environment, with the remaining 12 per cent having been incinerated.

It means that the bulk of your used cosmetics are probably still out there, polluting the waterways, shredding into microplastics and getting stuck up turtle’s noses like wrathful ghosts of your past beauty.

“Recycled plastic is fabulous,” summarises Afshar, “but at the end of its life, the recycling system is still broken. All you’ve added is an additional step.”

And he’s right. The authors of the Science Advances report conclude that if current production and waste management trends continue, around 12,000 metric tonnes of plastic waste will be in landfill or the natural environment by 2050. “That means that when we design materials,” Afshar explains, “we need to design them such that if they don’t get captured by those waste streams, they remain benign and don’t do anything detrimental to the environment.”

Someone should probably do something about all of this, which is why Jafferjee and Afshar have set

This broadly sums up my interview technique.

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up their design practice to try and intervene. The pair are two of the co-founders of Shellworks, an eastLondon startup that has created a range of packaging made from a biodegradable polyester typically used within medicine to create resorbable medical devices, such as sutures, meshes and implants. This polyester eschews petroleum as its base material, and is instead synthesised by bacteria. “It’s made from a fermentation process that is quite similar to how vinegar or beer is made,” says Jafferjee, explaining that as bacteria feed on a carbon source, they create polyesters in their cells. “You can think of it as fat,” adds Afshar, cutting through the science with an instinctive understanding of the communicative value of well-fed, contented bacteria. “It’s an energy storage system, which we then extract before the bacteria, and this is a loose term, start exercising and using that energy.” That liposucked polyester, once combined with natural additives such as cellulose-based fibres, forms a bioplastic that can be processed in the same manner as any conventional thermoplastic. “It’s [environmentally] benign,” adds Afshar, “but also injection-mouldable and mass manufacturable.”

As well as avoiding fossil fuels in its production, the Shellworks bioplastic has a number of material traits that support its use within the cosmetics industry. “It’s got good barrier properties against oils and waters, which for packaging is obviously great,” says Afshar. “It’s very rigid, although we’re now working on a more flexible variation too, and it’s also fairly robust. But the major selling point is that it naturally degrades without the need for any special conditions such as high humidity or temperature – bacteria that exist abundantly within marine and soil environments break it down through an enzymatic process.” This is significant, not least because it’s not true of many biodegradable plastics, which tend to be prima donnas about when and where they’ll begin their personal disintegration. Polylactic acid (PLA), for instance, is technically biodegradable, but requires industrial composting conditions, including temperatures above 58°C, if this reaction is to take place. “You put it on the package [that it] is biodegradable,” notes Frederik Wurm, a chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, in conversation with the University of Minnesota’s Ensia, “but at the point where these materials are[…] fear[ed] to end up, they will not biodegrade.” If PLA ends up on a roadside or floating down a river, it won’t

reach the temperatures required to compost. It will simply endure, stoically.

In this respect, Shellworks’ material represents a significant improvement. While it will still be subject to the vagaries of environmental conditions and temperature to some extent, it won’t just sit there, mournfully waiting for an industrial composter to come by and end it all. Which all sounds very encouraging, because if we’re going to be buying new lipsticks every six months for fear of oral desiccation, it seems only right that the empties should themselves shrivel up, ashamed. Enthused, I ask about the new material’s name. “We call it Vivomer,” says Afshar. “We wanted something that could take the notions people have of polymers, but also suggest something living.”

But what is it known as in the medical industry?

“The base material is polyhydroxyalkanoate,” Jafferjee replies.

That’s less catchy, I say. *** Shellworks, delightfully, is based on Fish Island, a former industrial area of east London close to the Olympic Park. For those who enjoy nominative coincidences, it is also a few doors down from a Shell garage. “We didn’t think about it at first, and then our packages began getting delivered to the garage,” says Jafferjee, with couriers sending photographic proof of delivery for parcels that were nowhere to be seen.

The only clue as to their location, Afshar explains, was “a very blurry photo in which you could see some shelves,” with those shelves no doubt well stocked with de-icer and Boost bars. “Then you think, Hmm, maybe they’re at the Shell garage.”

That name, Shellworks, reveals something of the company’s origins. The studio began life as a student group project for the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London’s Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) MA/MSC. “We specifically wanted to do something with an ecological impact,” explains Jafferjee, who had worked with Afshar before. “Amir had been working with new materials for a couple of years already, so waste materials kept coming up in the conversation.”

The pair partnered with course-mates Ed Jones

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and Andrew Edwards, and the four began exploring the possibilities of chitosan – a biopolymer extracted from the exoskeletons of shellfish. Although used in medicine for its antibacterial properties, chitosan, the team discovered, is not widely used in design or industry, despite being the planet’s second most abundant biopolymer after cellulose. “Very early on we identified that our strengths were design, engineering and manufacturing,” Jafferjee explains, “which was interesting because the reason why chitosan hadn’t taken off as a polymer was the manufacturability of it.” Developing a series of processes and machines, the team were able to create chitosan objects and packaging that could be used as natural fertilisers at the end of their lifespans. As well as being ecologically responsible, these pieces were oddly beautiful: duskily translucent vessels, amber and veined, like a rich bisque left out to achieve glorious solidity. After graduating in 2019, Jafferjee, Afshar and Jones decided to take the project on as a start-up.

Shellworks was an early success. Prior to moving to Fish Island in August 2020, the company received studio space as part of the Makerversity programme at Somerset House, and over the course of its lifespan it has raised $1.2m in investment and an additional $600k in grant funding. Alongside this institutional support, the team also began fielding enquiries from the beauty industry. “Within the beauty or personal care space, people already care about ingredients because they’re having to interact with the body,” explains Afshar. “Perhaps they also think more about sustainability because they’re already considering where things come from and how they interact.

It’s an interesting space because [historically] there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of solutions, but at the same time there is a very vocal community asking brands for something different.”

In response, Afshar explains, a number of “clean beauty brands” have emerged that trade on their environmental credentials. The Ordinary sells its skincare within apothecary-style glass dropper bottles with pipettes; Kankan packs body products in aluminium drinks cans like artisanal colas; and Lush sells “naked” lipstick refills sealed in biodegradable wax à la Babybel, with the brand reporting to have sold 16,108,320 unpackaged products in 2019, accounting for 62 per cent of its total sales. “There’s a definite shift and some

brands now have an ethos of saying, ‘I don’t mind paying a little bit more for my packaging as long as it’s sustainable,’” Afshar summarises. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with brands of all different scales, because even the bigger players are cognisant that change is coming. If they don’t invest or make decisions towards it now, it’s going to be problematic down the line.”

The chitosan products, which Shellworks branded as Shellmer, seemed as if they might play a role in this change, with an order arriving in 2020 for 5,000 pieces of packaging. “It was as we were trying to scale up to complete that first order that we understood how difficult the manufacturing was going to be,” explains Jafferjee. The issue, the pair explain, is that chitosan is a stubborn polymer that resists industrial processes, which is probably what you might expect of something extracted from the mighty mantle of a crab. “Getting it to scale in conventional manufacturing processes was pretty difficult,” says Afshar. “It doesn’t operate like a traditional plastic. While it has really good properties in that it can degrade quickly, those also mean that it’s difficult to put anything in, because as soon as you do so it starts to break down.” Although these issues can be somewhat mitigated by the addition of other materials, chitosan’s material quirks make it difficult to fit within existing manufacturing systems.

“We were going to have to create our own factories,” says Jafferjee, “which would have taken immense amounts of money.”

At the same time as these manufacturing issues became apparent, retailers began asking questions about provenance. “They have a checklist you have to go through,” Jafferjee says, “and one is that your product has to be vegan.” Shellmer, of course, is not – given that what cellulose is to trees, chitosan is to prawns – which itself raises questions about the ethics surrounding material alternatives to plastics.

It would clearly be preferable for plastic substitutes to not require the death of animals, but Shellmer is also a material created from a pre-existent waste stream that isn’t going away any time soon. According to the UK’s Marine Management Organisation, British fleets alone caught 146,800 tonnes of shellfish in 2019.

Those are a lot of waste shells, the bulk of which enter landfill, yet an early video explaining Shellworks’ chitosan material on YouTube saw debate erupt in the comments section:

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“Those shrimp and lobsters need their shells,” commented JE Hoyes.

Faced with these technical and ethical issues, the company pivoted towards polyhydroxyalkanoate, a material that had come up during its early research into medical materials. “We spend a decent amount of time looking at the medical industry because, ultimately, if something can go in the body, then it has probably been rigorously tested so as not to be detrimental to the environment,” says Afshar. “It just so happens that a lot of those materials are really expensive, because they’re either produced at a very high purity or else in small quantities for a specific process. There are always opportunities to say, ‘How can we use this in a different way? How can we reduce the cost, and increase the amount available?’”

As such, while the team grappled with the dual limitations of chitosan, ultimately turning down that initial order for 5,000 pieces (“Quite a big decision,” summarises Jafferjee), they were also reassessing polyhydroxyalkanoate. “I was working on fundraising and looking at all of these different technologies we’d considered in the past,” Jafferjee explains, “and I asked Amir, ‘Why is this one bad again?’

And we couldn’t find an answer, because in fact it’s a really good solution.”

The new material, the team explain, is simply better suited to the industrial demands placed upon packaging than chitosan. “With the previous material, even if we had a rigorous process, 10 parts would come out perfectly and then the 11th or 12th would be a disaster,” says Afshar. “And there’d be no reason for that, beyond it was perhaps a little bit more humid on a Tuesday afternoon.” For the past eight months, however, the team have been able to produce consistent injection-moulded Vivomer parts.

I ask whether they’ve managed to recoup that lost order for 5,000 units using the new material. “We started with a 1,000-piece order, we’ve just done 5,000, and now we’re working on 25,000,” Jafferjee responds. “After that, we’re talking about doing 100,000 units for customers on a monthly basis.”

So many fat bacteria.

“The global production of farmed shrimp in 2017 was estimated between 2.9–3.5 million tonnes,” responded Pyrotixs. “All those shrimp were grown in farms and were purposely bred to be eaten and discarded. The purpose of this research is to utilize the discarded shells. Its better for it to be recycled than to end up in a landfill.”

“Pyrotixs It’s better for shrimp to be left alone and not caged in intensive farms on coastlines,” replied JE Hoyes, undeterred. “Shrimp farms cause environmental damage.”

“Get with the times hippie, it’s not 1960s anymore,” interjected Richard Russell. “You should be more worried about Yellowstone.”

I don’t tell Afshar and Jafferjee this, but JE Hoyes is my kind of hippie. I am staunchly against catching shellfish for food, or any animal for that matter, and believe there are good ethical reasons for this. I also, however, have sympathy with the environmental rationale behind making use of waste materials, as argued for by Pyrotixs:2 it’s an imperfect world, and it may be better to play the hand that society has dealt us, rather than foregoing incremental improvement in favour of a sea change that is unlikely to come. At the same time, it’s difficult to stomach ongoing harm to animals, even if their polymer-rich remains could be useful in the service of a supposed greater good; it’s hard to see how systematic change can be brought about unless you hold the line somewhere. Shellmer’s veganism debate, then, is an interesting real-world dilemma, but not one that can be accommodated for by marketing. The need to dive into murky ethical waters, Jafferjee explains, is incommensurate with brands looking for sustainable packaging as an easy selling point for consumers. “Dealing with the question over veganism becomes an additional thing for brands to take on, whereas we wanted to make it as easy as possible,” she says. “It becomes a very personal issue,” Afshar adds, “and so it’s better that we don’t add yet another level of complexity to that.”

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*** The fruits of Shellworks’ labours are littered around their Fish Island space. Metal tooling adorns its tables and shelves, and a Boy 55M injection moulder sits proudly next to buckets of putty-coloured test parts, freshly pumped out. Another machine, a twin-screw

To my mind, only Richard Russell comes across badly in this exchange. To hell with you, Richard Russell!

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compounder, is on order and due to arrive soon, unless it was inadvertently delivered to the Shell garage weeks ago. Meanwhile, a miniature laboratory sits to the rear of the space, complete with a chemistryclass fume cupboard and petri dishes filled with plastic smears and powders. Tubs of various gums, one of which promises high acyl, sit mystifyingly among the detritus. Nearby, a set of egg-yolk yellow lockers is discreetly labeled with a flammable materials hazard symbol. It must, I realise, be where they keep the serious chemicals. Or else fireworks. Probably the chemicals, though.

“For chemicals in general, there are very few people trying to innovate at a large scale. It’s conservative as a industry.”

—Insiya Jafferjee

The team has been in the space for just over a year, but they’re already operating a micro production facility from within its confines. “We design our own tools, get parts, injection-mould them, and then test them,” says Jafferjee. “And we work on the material formulation in tandem.” The team currently develops Vivomer’s chemistry in-house, experimenting with different compositions, but Afshar tells me that they’re also hoping to begin working with the bacteria directly.

“Can we go right back to the cell?” he says. “Could we get the bacteria to actually create different types of polymer?”

“We’ve been working with a supplier on that so far,” adds Jafferjee, “but think we could learn about the material more deeply and make changes at a more granular level ourselves.” We have, I realise, moved a long way beyond establishing the ideal method for coffee preparation.

Although Shellworks works with industrial partners to produce in volume, the studio tries to operate in as self-sufficient a manner as possible. “For chemicals in general, there are very few people trying to innovate at a large scale,” Jafferjee explains. “It’s conservative as an industry.” The result of this, she says, is stasis.

If a factory’s setup is geared towards traditional

thermoplastics, it’s difficult for alternatives to get a look in, particularly given that new materials – even those specifically designed to fit within existing industrial processes – demand a degree of calibration.

“The industry has been doing the same thing for 50 years or even longer,” Afshar summarises, “and new materials coming into that sphere are typically made by material scientists who don’t really care about the way they’re going to be manufactured. They just give it to someone who does injection-moulding, who will then run it as a conventional plastic before giving up within 10 to 15 minutes because it doesn’t work.”

These issues are largely structural. Although consumer-facing brands are under pressure to move towards more sustainable packaging, it is typically the packaging manufacturers themselves who have direct contact with new materials. “We speak to companies who will say, ‘Well, we’re looking for this particular thing, whereas our existing packaging is just what we could find,’” explains Afshar. The standard model sees brands select packaging from manufacturers’ catalogues before applying branding, or else they hire industrial design consultancies to develop more custom pieces. “There’s a huge industry of those [consultancies],” notes Jafferjee. “So you end up with a lot of intermediaries.” What doesn’t tend to emerge from this ecosystem, however, are new materials, because there’s little financial impetus to fund their industrial development. “People will try to sell new materials to manufacturers, who are then responsible for selling those on to [companies],” says Jafferjee. “And that’s where it breaks down, because the manufacturer doesn’t want to take on a new material if there’s no benefit to them.

They have to put in extra work, the cycle time to make the product is longer, and therefore costs go up.”

With so many roadblocks to overcome, Shellworks’ bacteria probably have time to exercise around the clock. They’re probably bacterially hench. Which is why the studio’s solution to this tangle of competing interests is to try and reduce complexity by assuming the functions of several different types of companies and, in so doing, better connect the elements of the system that presently short-circuit one another. It is, I think, a little like the plot of Mrs Doubtfire, in which a divorced Robin Williams attempts to gain greater access to his children by dragging up as an elderly Scottish nanny in order to heal family trauma by

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playing multiple roles at once. Greater synchronicity between elements leads to fewer competing interests (in packaging, not in Doubtfire, where it somewhat backfires to cinematically amusing effect), and so

production, because the road to thermoplastic relapse is paved with good intentions. “When we send a tool out to someone so they can do a production run, we will also go there, help the person tune it in, and make sure they can comfortably run it,” says Afshar “And that’s not going to be a 15-minute process.

It’s going to be a two-hour process of them learning how to use it,” adds Jafferjee. “Because too many people told us what we couldn’t do when we started out and said that the things we wanted to try were impossible. But when we’ve actually tried those things ourselves, that hasn’t been our experience.”

“Too may people told us what we couldn’t do when we started out and said that the things we wanted were impossible. That hasn’t been our experience.”

*** For better or worse, change is coming. In April 2022, the UK introduces its Plastic Packaging Tax, which will impact all plastic packaging manufactured in, or imported into, the UK that does not contain at least 30 per cent recycled plastic. The scheme will, the government argues, “provide a clear economic incentive for businesses to use recycled plastic in the manufacture of plastic packaging, which will create greater demand for this material. In turn this will stimulate increased levels of recycling and collection of plastic waste, diverting it away from landfill or incineration.”

This, I suggest, is broadly a good thing – right?

Jafferjee and Afshar are measured in their response.

Although Vivomer largely avoids the problems that the changes are being brought in to address, the legislation will tax the material identically to virgin plastics, which perhaps goes to show quite how broad and unhelpful “plastics” can be as a piece of terminology. “Regulation is trying to have a positive impact, but there are certain nuances in the stuff that they’re passing that has upset the renewables industry,” Jafferjee says. There are fears, she explains, that larger companies have bought up supplies of post-consumer recycled materials, thereby positioning them to dominate the market. “And also,” she adds, “we’re trying to make renewable plastics! We don’t want to have any petroleum plastics in it.”

“It’s a weird dynamic, because people need to think about the whole picture, rather than just snippets,” agrees Afshar. The problem, the pair suggest, is that although the tax is well meaning, it is too blunt an instrument to tackle the complexity of the problem it attempts to solve. “It’s definitely

—Insiya Jafferjee

Shellworks is geared towards simultaneously engineering materials, designing packaging, and then organising its industrial production.

“It’s not just a packaging company or a design company or a biotech company, but a hybrid of all three,” says Afshar, “because one of the issues facing the industry is that brands speak a very different language to packaging companies, and they definitely speak a different language to scientists and engineers. We see ourselves as a communicator between these different parties.” As, no doubt, did Williams.

“Going straight to the customer is unique in this industry,” explains Jafferjee, “because if you can convince them, they’re then able to convince the manufacturer to take on this extra burden.”

Beauty brands, she suggests, are increasingly willing to accept higher prices for packaging as an R&D cost, or else can justify charging more for a product if its sustainability credentials are up to snuff. “Small things like that are where more traditional packaging companies don’t intervene,” Jafferjee says.

Actually, I suspect there are multiple areas of the manufacturing process in which Shellworks intervenes more than most. From listening to Afshar and Jafferjee talk, a significant proportion of their work seems to concern itself with logistics – ensuring that factories feel comfortable working with their material and don’t give up on it before they’ve cracked its industrial 80

Amir Afshar and Insiya Jafferjee.

The team’s Boy 55M injection moulder.

Vivomer colour samples, produced using natural dyes.

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easier from a messaging point of view to say to a general consumer, ‘Oh, that was 100 per cent virgin plastic, now it’s only 70 per cent and that’s great,’” says Afshar. “But there are questions around how you even assess whether someone’s put 30 per cent recycled plastic into their packaging, because chemically it’s the same.”

Such things matter, because the lattice of policy, economics and industrial systems within which new materials launch largely determines their future success. Afshar tells me that the team identify as “critical optimists”, and the first element of this compound seems the more pressing of the two.

As well as being sceptical about the current efficacy of recycling, Afshar and Jafferjee devote similar scrutiny to potential issues with their own material.

Polyhydroxyalkanoate may bring advantages over traditional plastics, but it also relies on a carbon source in its production. “You can use something like sugar, or you can use a waste source as well,” says Jafferjee. Of the two, waste seems the more environmentally palatable, tying back into the approach adopted with Shellmer, “but there are pros and cons that come into even that decision,” says Jafferjee. “The primary one is cost, because even though waste may be cheaper initially, you still have to purify it and that purification process may not be the most sustainable.” Although a polyhydroxyalkanoate plastic is positive in terms of end-of-life decay, the production of its bacterial feedstock also has to be taken into account – not least when this plays into issues around land-use if space that could be employed for food production is instead diverted towards plastics. “Where is it grown? How much land does it take up? How much water is needed?” summarised the University of Georgia’s Jenna Jambeck in conversation with National Geographic. “Bio-based plastics have benefits, but only when taking a host of factors into consideration.” Feeding bacteria is more complex than it sounds, particularly as I’d assumed they just ate mud or something.

These debates around production, Jafferjee and Afshar say, play out in their discussions around synthesising polyhydroxyalkanoate in-house, as well as in their reflections on the wider costs of their process.

As a base resin, Vivomer is two to four times more expensive than a traditional plastic, but the cost of the packaging can then be brought down through

engineering and the nature of the beauty industry.

“It’s about where you put your energies in terms of market,” says Afshar. “So food packaging is disgustingly cheap, a fraction of a penny basically, but within the cosmetics industry a large amount of their costs are already in packaging, because that’s where they can communicate something to their customers.” This, he says, allows Vivomer to compete. “Within that industry, we can get pretty close to what they’re

“If you can say, ‘Here’s a beautiful piece of packaging that is high performance, a similar price, and also sustainable,’ why wouldn’t brands switch over?”

—Amir Afshar

paying for conventional plastics,” he says. “It’s more like 10 or 15 per cent more expensive, which is relatively palatable.”

To demonstrate his point, Afshar brings over a box containing a number of sample products that the team has designed, several of which will launch this winter with brands including Liha Beauty, Sana Jardin and Bybi Beauty. Inside the box are monomaterial spatulas, tubs, and containers, and the team have also produced lipstick holders and droppers.

A mono-material pump, they say, is currently in development. The present samples are immaculately engineered, with precise screw caps, robust bodies that feel comfortable in the hand, and the Shellworks logo – which looks like a kind of simplified Celtic knot – moulded daintily on their bottoms. Each piece, the pair explain, is not only trying to replace their nonbiodegradable equivalents, but improve upon them.

“One thing that we hear all the time from customers is that they don’t have a solution for sampling, so we’re trying to work on that now,” says Afshar. “If companies don’t do sampling, people just end up buying the productand, if they then don’t like it, they throw it 82

away – so that’s wasteful. On the other hand, if they do sampling, they have to send out loads of small packages, which is also wasteful. So we’re trying to find whether we can engineer something that balances the two.”

In addition to careful engineering, the team places considerable focus on the aesthetic of their products.

Vivomer is able to stably hold natural dyes, allowing for a range of custom colours across pieces. “That’s more and more becoming our selling point, because matching a brand’s colours gives them confidence in you,” says Jafferjee. “There are some limitations, such that we might tell a customer that there will be a variation between two Pantones, but the fact that we are able to talk in Pantones is massive, because most companies won’t even do that.” She tells me about a conversation with a client that had proceeded positively until, suddenly, the customer raised an issue around colour. “‘Wait, wait, wait. You guys can make green, right?’” she remembers. “And we had actually already tested that brand’s green, so we sent them a sample pack. It was only then that they replied, ‘Let’s continue the conversation.’ It’s nuts, because it’s a simple thing to think about, but it’s something that other companies really struggle with.”

The samples in the box are a creamy oatmeal with ginger fleck, but elsewhere in the studio are teals, purples, blues and greens – some are matt, others speckled, and a handful of more experimental material studies have been executed in swirling ombres. Even within the more basic colours, there is depth. Vivomer is pearlescent, creating layers of colour that run through the material like lacquer. They feel too pretty to rot into mulch, but then I suppose that all beauty is ephemeral. If it wasn’t, the global beauty industry wouldn’t be worth some $500bn, and we’d all have more money to spend on French presses and chocolate bars from the garage. “Having designers in the team really helps, because we can be critical of ourselves,” says Jafferjee. “Sometimes people think that more scientific and material-based companies aren’t going to care about what something looks like, but for us it has to look beautiful and that’s what helps sell it to the customer.” Which sounds about right. Visual flourishes are niceties when considered alongside the severity of the plastic problem Shellworks aims to address, but they do matter in persuading brands to consider alternative materials. “If you approach companies and just say, ‘Here’s a sustainable version

of the packaging you’re using,’ they might feel it’s interesting from a personal point of view, but not invest because it’s not a priority,” says Afshar. “But if you can go to them and say, ‘Here’s a beautiful piece of packaging that is high performance, a similar price, and also sustainable,’ why wouldn’t they switch over?”

Well, let’s hope he’s right, because if we’re not going to be keeping our lipsticks for more than six months, it seems unfair that the planet should have to suffer them for hundreds of years instead. Given those 120bn units of packaging per year, that’s an awful lot of old lipstick left knocking around. “We talk a lot about this triangle,” says Jafferjee, “which is performance, cost and sustainability. If one is missing, then we’re not going to take off in scale, and the fundamental thing about plastics is that if you want to make an impact, you have to act on a large scale.” And that’s good to hear, I think, because just imagine the global shrivelling that’s en-route if we don’t.” E N D

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A Topography for Encounter Words Juliana Kei Photographs Bowy Chan

Growing up in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, I have a vague memory of boats carrying earth to fill in the harbour. I remember a different coastline and skyline, a different airport. Later, we started calling this newly made land West Kowloon, an addition to the southern part of the Kowloon peninsula that faces the Hong Kong island.

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thanks to its contrasting dark-green ceramic facade.

At night, the south facade of the tower turns into a “welcome” sign, with an integrated LED screen advertising the presence of M+. Up close, you realise that the elevated podium doubles as a platform, a public space that is open to all sides and which exists on multiple different levels. Visitors can travel up to the main galleries in the podium, or pass under into the industrial spaces below. A grand stairway – an element previously employed by H&dM at its 2016 Switch House extension of London’s Tate Modern – serves as a link between the museum’s entrance, its hovering podium, and underground cinema space.

The tower, meanwhile, houses the institution’s research and administrative departments – functions that are traditionally hidden away in back-of-house areas, but which here are intended to remain partially open. In Hong Kong, the adaptation of the museum into the podium tower has allowed H&dM to carry forward its experimentation in verticality in museums, also seen in the Switch House extension.

Underpinning all of this is the Found Space, a subterranean gallery for rotating installations that was carved out when the architects excavated around a pre-existing underground tunnel for Hong Kong’s Airport Express. This existing infrastructure had initially been seen as an obstacle that would complicate planning for the museum, but to H&dM it quickly become its raison d’être: an opportunity to look for what lies beneath the ever-changing land and sea of Hong Kong. Before the harbour was filled in the 1990s, the dockland surrounding what later became West Kowloon was variously used for factories, a fire station, and a camp for Vietnamese refugees entering Hong Kong by boats. Before that, it served as a military dock for the British Navy, where they made torpedoes.

These are just part of the complex, yet often obscured history of Hong Kong. Today, Hong Kong’s future is again at a crossroads. There are growing concerns about the erosion of freedom of expression and the public realm in Hong Kong, in particular after the implementation of the National Security Law in June 2020 that reduced Hong Kong’s judicial autonomy. Alongside ongoing travel restrictions caused by Covid-19, fears about censorship and oppression have left their mark on M+’s opening.

In September 2021, images of the works of Ai Weiwei, including a photo of the artist raising a middle finger in Tian’anmen Square, have been removed from M+’s

West Kowloon was developed as part of the city’s Airport Core Programme, a HK$160.2bn series of infrastructure projects focused around the new Hong Kong International Airport. Today, however, its reclaimed land is being put to different use. At the western end of West Kowloon is M+, a new cultural centre for 20th and 21st-century visual art, design and architecture, and the moving image, designed

by Herzog & de Meuron (H&dM). It is one of the focal points of the ongoing West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD), a government-backed development for the district masterplanned by Foster + Partners that comprises 16 arts and culture venues, a water-front park, a few skyscrapers, and a high-speed rail station that connects Hong Kong to Beijing.

In 2013, H&dM (in partnership with TFP Farrells and Arup) won the international competition for the M+ building, which comprises 17,000sqm of exhibition spaces, spread across 33 galleries. At the same time as H&dM worked on its architecture, the museum began building its collection. Reacting to Hong Kong and East Asia’s fast-evolving culture, M+ positions itself as a new kind of multidisciplinary institution dedicated to global visual culture: its collections, it says, “are rooted in Asia but defined, developed, and examined from a global perspective”. Other than visual arts, M+ also collects and showcases moving image works, design objects, architectural projects and everyday material culture from Hong Kong, Mainland China and beyond. In M+, one can find works as wide-ranging as Zhang Xiaogang’s well-known Big Family painting, Archigram drawings, Samson Young’s performance of Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th, Sony’s robot dog AIBO, and a plastic ball manufactured in Hong Kong in the late 1950s. It is a breadth, and curatorial framework set outside the hitherto dominant perspectives of North America and Europe, that hopes to set M+ apart from the leading art museums of the global north.

After eight years and multiple delays, M+ is now complete and open to the public. The project has seen H&dM grapple with the undefined and the unfamiliar.

A venue for contemporary visual culture is new to Hong Kong – we have never before had a modern or contemporary art museum. Yet while M+ highlights arts and cultural programmes previously underappreciated within the city, it is also a building type that we Hongkongers know well: a tower with a podium.

During the day, M+ stands out amidst Hong Kong’s skyline, which is mostly comprised of glass skyscrapers,

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spaces as well, such as a cinema and multimedia lounges. There is also the Found Space, which can be used for art, but also for architecture, design, or even moving image performances, audio visual works – all kinds of things. That ultimately makes everything so rich, because it’s really a building for cultural activity of all kinds.

webpage. More works by Ai and other political pieces acquired by M+ are currently “under review.”

“The ‘national security law’ that China’s central government passed last year has ruined the local political environment almost overnight,” wrote Ai for Artnet, “and has left the Chinese government’s promise of ‘one country, two systems’ as mere waste paper.” In this context, questions over what role architecture can play in facilitating artistic and creative freedom emerge.

With these issues lurking in the background, I spoke to Wim Walschap, the partner-in-charge, and Ascan Mergenthaler, a senior partner at H&dM. Over the course of our conversation, we were drawn inexorably to a question that sits at the heart of M+, and which the architects themselves asked upon winning the commission back in 2013: “What can lend authenticity to reclaimed land?”

“M+ is not only a museum

Juliana Kei I studied architecture as an undergraduate

Wim Walschap And while it’s correct to say that the

at the University of Hong Kong, and I remember going to the early presentations for the WKCD. It’s nice to see that M+ is now complete, and I suspect that many people in Hong Kong will probably feel the same way: “Finally. We have our very long overdue contemporary and modern art museum.” So I wanted to go back to the beginning, because the commission for the project actually came before the museum’s collection had been assembled. It also came at a time when the notion of East Asian art, or even East Asian modern art, remained relatively undefined.

Ascan Mergenthaler It was a special competition and I think that helped us develop the design. It was not the kind of competition where teams were invited to develop a design without any exchange with and context from the client. Instead, they invited six teams to not only compete, but also to come to Hong Kong for workshops. We basically tested a client dialogue with them during that competition process, which was a powerful tool for all of us to understand the common goals and aims of this project. That made our competition proposal so much stronger, because we had the opportunity to test ideas and understand a little bit better what they needed. Because M+ is not only a museum for contemporary art and modern art; as the name implies, it’s a museum for visual culture.

That was interesting for us, because it makes it a much richer experience – it’s not only about white cube galleries, because it needs other, very specific,

actual collection was not yet there at the time of the competition, there had already been Uli Sigg’s donation, which was an important start [Sigg is a Swiss art collector who holds the largest private collector of contemporary Chinese art in the world.

In 2012, he donated a portion of his collection to M+, which now encompasses 1,510 works of Chinese art from 1972 to 2012, ed.]. Even during the competition we were able to do some planning with a curator who knows that collection well. So it wasn’t that there was absolutely nothing to start from.

Juliana And did anything change over the years as the collection grew? Did the museum’s needs change?

Wim Not much. I don’t think we ever had to change the design because of a certain piece. What I do remember, however,is that they had to re-check the loads on the podium roof, for example, because they had a huge sculpture which they wanted to mount on the building. Things like that happened, but in a very limited way.

Ascan There were almost two parallel work streams.

We were working with them on the refinement of the different exhibitions in the display spaces we were developing, while they were simultaneously building up the collection. There were some items, of course, that they were very excited about. They shared the news with us, for instance, when they bought the sushi bar from Japan [Shiro Kuramata’s 1988 interior for Tokyo’s Kiyotomo restaurant, which represents

for contemporary art and modern art; as the name implies, it’s a museum for visual culture.” —Ascan Mergenthaler

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1

2

3

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1 Shiro Kuramata, Ishimaru Kiyotomo sushi bar (1988).

2 Liang Shuo, Urban

Peasants (1999–2000).

3 Wang Wei, 1/30th of

a Second Underwater (1999).

4 Fang Lijun, 1995.2 (1995) 5 The museum has been designed to be porous between its interior and exterior spaces, encouraging public engagement with the building and its collections.

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Kuramata’s last extant work of interior design, ed.], but even that did not have a direct impact on the planning and they were able to accommodate it within the space. That’s the strength of the building: it allows for flexibility. Spaces are not tailored around one piece.

Juliana Was this experience on M+ similar to any of your other museum projects from around the world?

Ascan Some of it was similar and some goes a little beyond what we have done before in museums. It was important to consider the moving image, for example, so we have three cinemas in this building. The Found Space, meanwhile, is an extreme example of something we’re always looking for in our work. Is there anything we can dig out? Is there something on the site that we can use as a first creative input, or something we can rub shoulders against to develop something? Reclaimed land can be difficult because it’s just flat and there’s no context whatsoever: that’s always a challenge for us because we like things we can react to. So that’s why we were very happy when they pointed out this Airport Express tunnel to us as an obstacle, because we could actually turn it into a really positive thing for the building. The method is not so dissimilar to Tate Modern, which was also a project that was almost archeology: you’re looking for these found spaces.

Juliana And this focus on context is something you’ve worked with in Hong Kong before. The Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage & Arts is a cultural space that you finished in 2018, for example, which was created in a compound formed from Hong Kong’s former Central Police Station, Central Magistracy and Victoria Prison.

Ascan Yes, Tai Kwun is a little bit similar in that we carefully analysed the existing urban fabric to see where we could open up and make new connections.

It was a very thorough analysis of what was there, and then a case of activating those found spaces and making them accessible. In that regard the method was pretty much the same, but the result was unexpected and very different one from any buildings that we have done before.

Juliana Tai Kwun is quite a different context with all its alleyways and the existing courtyard spaces, whereas one of the key design elements for M+ is its public forum, which underpins the entrance into the building. Hong Kong is a place that has interesting manifestations of public spaces. A lot of people in Hong Kong treat shopping malls or privatised spaces as public spaces. People in Hong Kong are used to

walking around the atrium spaces of malls like The Element, which is so big that it’s divided into five zones, or moving between the network of buildings that connects the harbor and hills. There is also the well-known entrance plaza of the HSBC building, designed by Norman Foster. How you envision that public forum of M+ functioning in Hong Kong and within the context of a museum?

Wim We elevated the volume and freed the ground floor up as much as possible, giving the possibility for permeability and access from all sides on both the ground floor and at the waterfront level. This is a public area both inside and out, and it’s a social space for people. Of course, you can go further into the museum, but you can also just stay there and have a coffee or meet people. It has a relation to what you see in the shopping malls, but it’s a very different space and not one focused on commercial activities.

It can be a space where you just hang out and it even has an extension on the roof. From that ground floor, you can go all the way up to the roof garden on top of the podium. That is supposed to be a public space, which is accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Ascan It’s a platform for exchange and for supporting

encounters between people and art, and also just between people. That was absolutely key, because there are only a few cultural buildings in Hong Kong right now, and they tend to be very closed. They’re hermetic structures with one front door, and it’s not so easy to go inside – there’s a physical and a psychological barrier to making that step. It was important that we send a very different message: “Please come in.” Just come under the roof to be sheltered from the sun and rain, and then you’re invited to go further and discover things. You’re invited to discover the Found Space. You’re invited to look up through the slots and discover the gallery level and the tower above. These vertical moments, which are almost like a section through the entire building, were actually important for us to make accessible and easy to engage with. That’s a huge opportunity, because cultural activities in Hong Kong have so far been a little bit elitist. The hope with M+ is that it will invite in more people and spark interest in different levels of society. And that’s not only the architecture, it’s also the programme.

Wim There’s choice.

Ascan Maybe its easier for people to immediately relate to popular culture or movies or design, but then they’ll also look around the corner and discover the art collection and the ink drawings and everything else they have there. It’s going to be so rich in terms of materials. There is also the tower facade, which we animated with embedded LED strips. That not only anchors the building in this very typical Hong Kong skyline, but it’s also a kind of billboard. It’s an artistic message from the curators or the artists. You’re almost inviting people from Hong Kong Island to come over to Kowloon. It’s way of sending out a message to the people of Hong Kong: “Please come and visit us.

Here is something of interest for you.”

Wim It’s the endpoint, insofar as from the ground floor you can go up to that roof garden where you actually have that screen, and it’s so close by – you can almost physically touch it. Also in the materiality, there is no break between the outside and inside of the public space. The treatment of the floors, the ceilings, the cladding on the different walls is the same. So that also helps to invite people in and not create any kind of threshold between inside and outside.

Juliana In the past few years there’s been a paradigm shift in museums or centres for visual culture in terms

of showing, archiving and displaying digital art and design, but also in terms of decolonisation. You’ve spoken about making the back-of-house aspect of galleries and museums more visible to encourage participation – is that how you see architecture’s role in the changing paradigm of museums and galleries?

“The big paradigm shift happened 20 years ago with Tate Modern. It was a place to invite the community into.” —Ascan Mergenthaler Ascan I mean, the big paradigm shift happened 20

years ago with the Tate Modern – not that it was the only one, but it was the most prominent example of a museum for contemporary art suddenly not only being a museum to store and show art, but also a platform for exchange and education. It was a place to invite the community into and it became a social centre of a sort, which its 5 million plus visitors per year is testament to. People just go there. They might look at an exhibition, or they might meet friends, or see a movie or a lecture or a talk, or whatever.

So it’s not like we did this for the first time with M+ – we started to work on these ideas more than 20 years ago, but of course you can always add another dimension to it. In M+, this idea of learning, and the idea of exchange and encounter is very much in the foreground. It’s very prominently located on the ground floor, so it’s very accessible, but it’s also nice that you can sit on the roof, so theoretically you can have outdoor classes or impromptu learning sessions and exchanges with school classes and smaller groups.

It’s literally a topography for encounter and exchange.

Juliana The idea of topography is really fitting in the case of Hong Kong, which has sometimes been described as “a city without ground.” In areas like Central or Causeway Bay there are so many artificial ground levels created by sky bridges and the podiums of high-rise buildings. I think people in Hong Kong are programmed into walking between those elevated levels. On those bridges, even without street names and numbers, we still know where we are going.

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6 Kongkee, Flower in the Mirror (2021).

7 Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries,

Crucified TVs — Not A Prayer In Heaven (2021).

8 Lin Tianmiao, Braiding (1998).

9 One of M+’s gallery spaces.

10 A view into the WKCD’s Art Park, within which the museum sits.

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Ascan It’s interesting that you mention that, because

it’s definitely true. It’s simultaneously fascinating and disturbing. What I find interesting about Hong Kong’s network is that not everything is happening on street level, not everything is happening in public space. The boundaries between private and public space are so blurred, which is compelling but at the same time confusing, because sometimes you cannot immediately get down to where you want to go. You’re very restricted in your movements and the pathways are very pre-defined. Coming from Europe, it’s a little bit of a frustrating experience – like being on a highway where you can’t find the exit.

Wim And not easy to orientate.

Ascan Very difficult. That’s something we tried to do differently in Tai Kwun. You’re still on different levels there, but it’s a quite natural flow and it’s not pre-prescribed or pre-conceived how you have to navigate through that site. It’s very open and the same is true for M+. It has also these different levels, but there are so many different possibilities as to how you connect to them. Yes, you can take the escalators but you can also walk through the auditorium, you can take the stairs, an elevator.

It’s very open and in that regard I think it’s very different compared to the typical built topography you find in Hong Kong.

Wim It’s not stressful. You have choice, not only in terms of content, but also how to circulate through those spaces. There’s more than one solution, more than one option.

Juliana Going into Tai Kwun, I’ve always found that there is a sense of, “I can stop if I want to. I don’t have to keep moving.”

Ascan Try to do that elsewhere in Hong Kong, and you’re immediately overrun. It has a different speed to it, I guess. It’s much slower, and that’s nice. It slows people down to perceive the context and the environment in a different kind of way. There are many similarities between Tai Kwun and M+, but at the same time they’re so different, not least in terms of sheer scale. It was nice that we were able to do Tai Kwun before M+, because we got to learn more about the city. It was a little bit like an incubator, starting what could later happen on a larger scale with M+.

But Tai Kwun is really about being in the heart of the city, where Hong Kong is at its densest. It’s an oasis, whereas M+ sits on the edge of Kowloon on an empty piece of land. So to create a moment of

density there – in a different kind of way, and maybe in terms of its content – was the aim.

Juliana And how do you do that?

Ascan One project is about revitalisation and the other is about vitalisation – injecting life into a place that was basically a wasteland. It’s about how can

“You have choice, not only in terms of content, but also how to circulate through those spaces.”

—Wim Walschap

you create a space that doesn’t become boring or repetitive, and in which you have a lot of diversity: spatial diversity, proportional diversity, different materials, different experience in terms of how light comes into the spaces. From the outside, the building looks so simple. It’s an upside down T-shaped volume floating above the ground. But once you’re inside, you discover all these different layers and details and proportions and scales and vistas. Our aim was to create something like a city within the city, a very rich experience on something that was just an empty piece of land. I mean, this piece of land was nothing.

You would not have gone there. And suddenly, everybody from Hong Kong will go there.

Juliana When we’ve talked about museums over the last few decades, the Bilbao Effect and an institution’s relationship with its city has often been at the forefront of the conversation. But in Hong Kong it’s quite different. Our city is led by global finance, it also has its relationship with tourism. It’s already a very globalised city. I wonder whether this consideration of how architecture will have a dialogue with the city’s future development or its past affect your design?

Ascan I mean, you don’t have to put Hong Kong on the map. They have a different problem to Bilbao in that they need to put culture at the heart of Hong Kong.

It is there, it’s just not visible and it’s not palpable.

We were in a very lucky position because through Tai Kwun we had already been able to contribute to this and make the cultural life of the city visible and accessible. And of course on a much bigger scale,

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we can now do that again with M+. That’s pretty unique to have the opportunity to do that twice in a city. I think that’s ultimately what Hong Kong is aiming for with this building – you put in the foreground something which has been a little bit neglected or not so obvious.

Juliana Foregrounding is interesting, because while you were building M+, everything in the WKCD has changed around you. There are a lot of different buildings that are now completing and also perhaps competing with M+ [at present, 17 different visual culture and performing arts facilities are planned for the site, ed.]. How do you see the development around WKCD and its relationship with M+?

Wim The good thing is that we are at the very end of that line of venues. We are next to the park at the very westernmost part, so it’s quite nice that we will never be in between two buildings. And in addition to that, we were also lucky to do the two buildings immediately behind the museums: the CSF, the conservation and storage facility building, and also the office tower where the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority is based. So we could already create quite a strong

cluster of buildings that have a clear relation with each other. But I think our project will always stand out. I’m not worried about what will be next to it.

Ascan We were in the lucky position that the project orientates itself towards the city, towards the water, towards the harbour, towards Hong Kong Island and towards the park. And, as Wim said, we were able to create our own little urban context with these two supporting buildings. And they’re a fantastic opportunity, because often storage and conservation rooms in museums are hidden away, or somewhere in the basement, and you never see them. Here, it’s nice that on the one hand you have the place where you can see art and culture, and on the other you can see where all the exhibition prep is happening thanks to a big window that looks through into that area.

I like that a lot of the ingredients that actually make a museum work are visible. The tower is the same idea in that regard. It’s primarily for the administrative functions of the museum, but rather than tucking them away and treating them as an afterthought, they’re in the foreground. These people who think and run and make this museum alive are right there, and you see how they work. And then they also connect to the city and the place.

Wim The media screen will also play a role in that.

Of course, the museum building is free-standing at the moment, although there will be something next to it eventually, but even now, with these huge towers behind it, M+ stands out. The building is there, it’s present, and that will not change.

Ascan It’s an amazing opportunity for Hong Kong.

The idea of the WKCD, and creating a cultural mile of theatre, of Cantonese opera, visual culture, music, all these things, is amazing. I really hope that they’ll be able to realise all these buildings. It’s an ambitious plan and if they don’t succeed in realising the rest, then it will become a little bit of an awkward situation because you will have these fragments like missing teeth. But I think the overall concept is smart: that you use the commercial buildings to financially support the cultural one.

Juliana And while M+ was still under construction, the park was really the one thing mediating the experience of going to that part of the city. The park was completed first and it drew people to see what was going on there.

Ascan It’s so important that you have significant and great, green spaces in a city, especially in a city such

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as Hong Kong. The masterplan is smart: condensing the buildings on one are of the site, leaving enough room for a large, active parkland on the remainder.

They’ve been clever about this, because the park recently completed and made the site accessible, and so people got used to how to get there. Also, programmatically, M+ was already around organising exhibitions in the city. They built the institution at the same time as we built the building.

Wim It’s also interesting that it’s actually, at least in my experience, one of the very few locations in Hong Kong where you can get very close to the water, even though Hong Kong is at the harbour. The sea somehow always feels so far away.

Ascan Speaking about water, if we could have one last wish, it would be amazing – and we mentioned this to the client – if there could be a direct Star Ferry line to the museum with a little jetty there. That would be so beautiful. The only drawback at the moment is that it’s still not the easiest to get to, whereas a direct Star Ferry line would make it so straightforward. It would also provide a sense of arrival, because when you take the metro you will always arrive from the back.

So hopefully it’s going to be realised.

Wim It was part of the masterplan, but it’s probably not coming so soon.

Juliana But it’s already been quite a long project – nine, almost ten, years. So what was the most memorable part of the process?

Wim I think that is still to come. The building is opening and will soon be populated by the people of Hong Kong, which is the moment that I was looking forward to – but we will not be part of it.

Ascan To not be able to go there for the opening is very difficult. On the other hand, it’s a building for the people of Hong Kong and it’s nice that they will be the most important people at the opening. This period is probably the first time in history where buildings are being opened without their architects present, and maybe that’s an opportunity. This is a strong sign to the community and the people of Hong Kong.

“Here, this building is for you. Enjoy it.” E N D

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Chen Zhen, Round Table

– Side by Side (1997).

Welcome to the Island Words and photographs Crystal Bennes

RYB, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.

Chromogenic print soaked in Gipsön seawater.

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I’ve become so habituated to the noises of the island that it takes me a few moments to realise that I’m not hearing anything. This is my third and final visit. It’s a hot day in late August; no clouds in the sky, perfectly still, bright sun baking my hatless head. The noise I’m listening for and not hearing is the sound of 12 wind turbines dotted around the island’s periphery. Having become accustomed to their loudness, like a helicopter in surround sound, now that the turbines aren’t moving, now they’re making no sound, it’s evident how much their presence impacts the atmosphere of the place.

This is Gipsön, a small island of 43 hectares located off the west coast of southern Sweden, just in sight of a town called Landskrona, population 40,000. Yet, in a way, it hardly feels appropriate to call Gipsön an island. “Human-made radioactive waste pile in the sea” would be a more accurate description, but you’d be hard pressed to read it as such when standing amidst the tall grasses, wildflowers and young birch trees that have found footing on its artificial soil.

“Gipsön” comes from “gypsum”, which in turn comes from an ancient Greek word meaning chalk, according to some, and calcined or burned according to others. Gypsum is a naturally occurring mineral that humans have used as as a building material for centuries, and as a soil conditioner since at least the 18th century. The gypsum (technically phosphogypsum) that made Gipsön island, however, is a by-product of the production of phosphoric acid, an in-demand synthetic fertiliser manufactured on a massive scale – around 50m metric tons in 2019 alone – by the agricultural industry.

Why does agriculture have such an insatiable appetite for phosphoric acid? There are three primary nutrients required for healthy plant growth: nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Although the science is complex, and the causes and effects not entirely straightforward, today’s monoculture agricultural practices tend to deplete natural soil fertility and instead rely on artificial fertilisers to supply adequate nutrition. To obtain phosphoric acid, rock phosphate is treated with an acid, usually sulphuric, phosphoric or nitric. The resulting acid is shipped out as fertiliser, while the phosphogypsum waste product is stored in vast “containment ponds” or “stacks” indefinitely.

For each ton of acid produced, five times the amount of phosphogypsum is created as a by-product.

In Florida, where fertilisers are a multi-billiondollar industry, these chalk-white mountain-high

phosphogypsum stacks are a worrying feature of the industrial-chemistry landscape. These stacks are also mildly radioactive, with phosphogypsum frequently classified as non-nuclear radioactive waste. Given that phosphate ore contains radioactive uranium, thorium and radium (although considerable variations in its chemical composition exist) phosphogypsum is also radioactive. Concentrated through the fertiliser production process, however, phosphogypsum is usually more radioactive than the unprocessed ore.

When phosphogypsum is formed into stacks, some of this radioactivity, namely radon gas, is thought to be trapped in the crust that forms on top of the stack.

Countries such as the US have long banned the reuse of phosphogypsum in other industries – road building, for instance – largely because dangerous levels of radon emission could occur if the phosphogypsum is moved. Phosphogypsum and its process wastewater can also contain carcinogens and toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, lead, mercury, antimony or arsenic.

In Florida and elsewhere, phosphogypsum storage threatens communities and environments, particularly through the ongoing risk of groundwater contamination.

In the same way that we currently have no good solutions for the disposal of nuclear waste, we have yet to come up with any ideas for the disposal of low-level radioactive waste materials – beyond heaping them up in large piles. Around 40m tonnes of phosphogypsum are added annually to stacks in the US alone, with a further 90m tonnes added to stacks elsewhere. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that these amounts will more than double by 2040. Of equal concern is the fact that phosphorus pollution affects nearly 40 per cent of Earth’s land areas, largely made manifest in freshwater sources around the world. Polluted waters suffer from eutrophication, or excess nutrient levels, which cause algal blooms, the death of fish and plants, and also reduces the amount of water available for human and animal consumption. The toxicity of the phosphogypsum stacks serves as a reminder of the wider environmental costs of the industry of which they are a byproduct.

The same might be said, in even starker form, of the phosphogypsum island. *** To begin to understand the phenomenon of Gipsön, it’s essential to consider the island’s broader geographic

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Aerial view of Landskrona with Gipsön and Gråen in the foreground. Date unknown. Reproduced as part of the series No Island Is An Island (photo: Anders Hilding/Landskrona Museum).

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History of a Fertiliser Factory, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.

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and historic context. Its creation story starts with Gråen, another artificial island created in the 18th century that was intended as a fortification for Landskrona’s harbour and its 16th-century citadel.

In part because of its prior military importance to both the Danish and Swedish crowns, and in part because of its naturally deep harbour, Landskrona had a long history of involvement in international trade and

Just one year after Supra was awarded its permit, the Swedish government issued a new environmental protection act in 1969 that prohibited the discharge of any wastewater, solids or gas from industry into lakes or other bodies of water. As such, in 1974 Supra’s permit was reconsidered in light of the act and the company was prohibited from continuing to pipe waste out into the water. The output of dissolved gypsum into the sea eventually ceased completely in 1978. Until the factory finally closed in 1992, however, Supra didn’t stop producing fertiliser, meaning that it required a new way of dealing with its waste. Gipsön was the answer.

Construction of the island began in 1978. The first step was to mark out the perimeter boundaries in a large, sloping stone retaining wall – a technique used to similar effect on Gråen, the defensive island which was later connected to Gipsön’s northern edge. With this retaining wall in place, two long dykes that curve around the north side and south-east corner of the island were constructed. These were built to trap any contaminated run-off or rain water, preventing it, at least in theory, from leaching into the sea. The island was then formed, quite simply, by piling up wet-on-wet layers – a little like making a toxic watercolour painting.

The water from each layer subsequently evaporated, a sludgy, chalky base formed, and the process repeated.

Photographs of Gipsön under construction depict a landscape that partly resembles a desert, partly an arctic tundra.

Between 1980 to 1990, it is estimated that 4.5m cubic meters of phosphogypsum were piled up to form the island. Originally 18m-high at its tallest point, it now measures 15m after years of compression and evaporation. At some point, a large container pond was constructed in Gipsön’s northern corner. This pond holds run-off from the dyke after it has been treated by an on-island purification plant (controlled and monitored from the mainland), which uses lime to reduce the water’s pH from an extremely acidic 1.4 to around 9. Once the pH of the pond water holds stable, it is released back into the sea (which generally has a pH of 8.1). In 1996, a small 7.2 megawatt wind farm, those 12 turbines, was added to the island.

As the gypsum contains toxic heavy metals, the bare mounds have become marine dead zones in which nothing grows and no life can be supported. maritime industries. In the 1880s, the presence of these industries was a factor in a group of Swedish and Danish capitalists electing to build a new fertiliser factory on Gråen – a facility that was moved to the mainland in 1907. Today, Gråen is home to a sizeable group of allotments and a bird sanctuary. The only trace of the former factory are two adjacent barn-like buildings, purchased by the allotment association in the 1960s and used mainly for parties and events.

Although it’s not entirely clear how the mainland factory initially disposed of its waste, by 1968 its owner Supra was awarded permission from the Swedish government to release the phosphogypsum byproduct directly into the Öresund strait. Pipes were laid to transport the waste 4km out to sea and, over the course of 10 years, it is estimated that around 1.5m tonnes of dissolved phosphogypsum were dumped into the sea. Supra assumed that the phosphogypsum would simply disperse, but many of the heavier silicates and sand-like materials (present in the raw ore) in fact settled on the seafloor in two cigar-shaped mounds, which remain to this day. The larger of the two is approximately 400m-long by 120m-wide and 8m-tall at its highest point. As the gypsum contains unknown quantities of toxic heavy metals, the bare mounds have become marine dead zones in which nothing grows and no life can be supported.

*** I first became interested in Gipsön while searching for a subject to propose to the Landskrona Foto residency, 106

En Död Fågel from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.

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Super NPK, circa 1967. Reproduced as part of the series No Island Is An Island (photo: Anders Hilding/Landskrona Museum).

Saltöken, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.

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a biannual programme that supports contemporary artists. Initially thinking of something on maritime shipping, I became distracted by a peculiar island just off the city’s coast while zooming in and out of satellite maps. I’d previously spent a year working in Paris on a project about the relationship between the city’s geology – namely, its limestone and gypsum foundations – and its built environment, so when I discovered that the peculiarly-shaped island was created entirely out of gypsum, I knew I’d found my subject.

After arriving in Landskrona, I was surprised by how little the city’s residents seemed to know about Gipsön beyond its mere existence. I suspect this was partly because the island is now under the management of Norwegian fertiliser giant Yara, rather than the city.

Although many Landskronans have heard of Gipsön, few know much beyond its vague relationship to the fertiliser industry. Even fewer have actually been to the island – hardly surprising considering that it’s strictly off-limits to the public, who are only allowed to visit twice a year in limited numbers on guided tours escorted by a Yara employee. During my month-long residency, thanks largely to the efforts of Landskrona Council employees and a retired Yara chemist, I was lucky enough to make three extended visits to Gipsön.

Perhaps realising that a 43-hectare salt-white gypsum desert wasn’t a desirable aesthetic, Yara partnered with a Swedish sewage-treatment company in the late 1990s or early 2000s to cover the island with thousands of tonnes of solid sludge leftover from sewage-treatment processing. While there are a few places on the island where the gypsum remains visible today – the one area of the island that I wasn’t allowed to visit on my own, because of the danger of falling and becoming trapped, features a couple of 5m-deep open cracks where the gypsum layers are clearly apparent – most of its surface is now covered in wildflowers, grasses and even trees. Many plants on Gipsön echo those on the mainland. There is hare’s-foot clover, common tansy, bushgrass, and viper’s bugloss, but I also spot a patch of glorious carline thistle – sometimes called fireweed for of its spiny gold and bronze daisylike flowers – that I haven’t seen anywhere else in Landskrona. Gipsön today is a strange combination of peaceful, pastoral nature reserve and deafening, post-industrio-chemical landscape. Sitting next to the fireweed, making notes of wildflower names, I think about how important it is that my work doesn’t

promote an idea of the island as a techno-sublime landscape, but as a complex entanglement of capital, environment, workers, extraction, legislation, local history and global impact.

Although the actions which led to Gipsön’s creation were carried out by Supra, it is Yara that now holds total responsibility for the island. Supra celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1982, just one year after the energy giant Norsk Hydro had bought a 75 per cent stake in the company. Norsk Hydro has a long and fascinating history itself, dating back to 1905 when its industrialist founders Sam Eyde and Kristian Birkeland figured out how to fix synthetic nitrogen using electrical arcs; a method that was initially the preferred contender for industrial production. It was only replaced when the chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to produce ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen, with the resultant Haber-Bosch process – for which Haber won the 1918 Nobel Prize for chemistry – proving more energy efficient. Between 1980 and 2000, Hydro began acquiring a large number of other fertiliser companies – one of which was Supra. In 2004, a de-merger separated the fertiliser business into a new company, Yara, while the petrochemical wing of the company remained as Hydro (although this also merged with the Norwegian state-owned petroleum company, Statoil, in 2006, with the resultant company now known as Equinox). In contrast to the “green” image frequently presented by Scandinavian countries, the histories of industrial-chemical companies such as Supra and Yara, and their close ties to the state, complicate such straightforward narratives of environmental sustainability.

Before, during and after my Landskrona residency, I spent a lot of time attempting to contact people at Yara to no avail. I even managed to sneak into their office building in Malmö, but it turned out to be the end of summer holidays and so no one was there.

A later conversation with a marine-environment activist who had managed to speak with an environmental officer at Yara (one of the same people who had refused to speak to me), however, suggested that the company’s line on Gipsön is that the problem was inherited from Supra and they do not want to draw further attention to it. And yet, while Yara may believe that it is merely the unfortunate inheritor of a bad environmental situation, the company has a poor track record when it comes to environmental, social and political issues of its own making. In a 2015 corruption

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scandal, for instance, four Yara executives were sentenced to prison for their involvement in bribing high-ranking officials in India and Libya in exchange for establishing ventures in their countries. Yara is also one of the world’s largest producers of synthetic fertilisers, which are a major contributor to climate change: production of ammonia alone is believed to contribute between 1 and 2 per cent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, for example. This is only one part of its environmental impact, however.

Because Yara produces fertiliser using natural gas – largely methane, and lots of it – it is Europe’s biggest industrial buyer of natural gas and an active lobbyist for fracking. As an industry that relies on extractive activities, phosphate-based fertilisers are hugely damaging to the environment, with a 2015 Global Justice Now report alleging that Yara has a true climate impact of nearly 75m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, as opposed to the 12.5m tonnes it self-declares.

Although fossil fuel companies such as Shell and British Petroleum are often visible targets of climate change activism, some 29 per cent of global emissions are associated with food production. The agri-food sector, and companies such as Yara, are integral to maintaining and expanding these systems.

This contribution towards climate change is often defended on the grounds that without the use of synthetic fertiliser in agriculture, billions of people would die of starvation. Such arguments have been present in various forms, often laced with white supremacy, since the fertiliser industry’s early days.

In his 1905 book, The Wheat Problem, British chemist William Crookes – who seven years earlier had entreated scientists to urgently solve the problem of artificial nitrogen production – wrote, “The fixation of nitrogen is vital to the progress of civilised humanity, and unless we can class it among the certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life”. In his 1918 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Haber, too, spoke of the need to increase fixed nitrogen production from “a few hundred thousand tons a year[…] to millions of tons”.

I had a similar conversation (albeit in a less extreme form), sitting on a dilapidated wooden bench overlooking the water purification plant on Gipsön, with the polite and intelligent retired industrial

chemist who had accompanied me. You might feel that artificial fertilisers are bad from an environmental point of view, he told me, but I wouldn’t want to have to choose which 2 billion of the world’s population would have to die if we stopped using them. The opening lines of a short marketing film made by Yara in 2020, ‘From Earth to Table’, state: “Mineral fertiliser has saved more lives than any other invention that mankind has created”. Of course, such arguments infrequently account for the fact that access to affordable food is extremely uneven across the world.

Although, according to some reports, enough food is produced to easily feed more than the world’s total population, between 700 to 800 million people globally continue to go hungry. Equally, rather than contribute directly to human food production, fertilisers are often used for feed crops for livestock and, increasingly, for biofuels. In Western countries, increased levels of food production have also gone hand in hand with higher levels of food wastage.

The arguments are not straightforward. *** Before coming to Landskrona, while researching the impact of Gipsön and the gypsum pipeline into Öresund, I kept encountering the name Kjell Andersson. A retired Lund University research engineer, prolific diver, and a tireless campaigner for Sweden’s marine environment, Andersson has spent much of his adult life raising awareness of the disconnect between Sweden’s self-image as an “eco” nation and the damage that its industries cause to underwater ecosystems in particular. In 1990, together with Lund University colleague Peter Jonsson, Andersson initiated the first Havsresan event, which is now hosted by the Swedish Coast and Sea Center (SCSC). Every year, professional and amateur divers gather for a week in a different location around Sweden to document marine environments, clear ghost nets abandoned by the fishing industry, take bottom samples, and organise educational activities for the public. To my good fortune, the 2021 Havsresan was being held the last week of August in Landskrona.

Given Andersson’s knowledge of Gipsön and the area around Landskrona, I was enthusiastic – much, I suspect, to the SCSC’s surprise – to participate as a diver and documentarian, but also to take advantage of the collective experience of SCSC members with 110

respect to their knowledge about Supra, Landskrona and Gipsön. I scheduled my residency specifically to coincide with the Havsresan.

Nautical charts provide important information about coastal areas. When you look at a nautical chart of Landskrona, for example, you notice that the small

We searched for the pipes for over an hour, crossing back and forth over the line marked on the nautical chart, to no avail. We found no trace of them. channel between Gipsön and the city’s port is fairly deep – around 10m – but most of the surrounding sea is incredibly shallow, between 0.5 and 1.5m. You also notice a long line of red dots and dashes, stretching from the west side of the narrow neck of Gipsön about 4.5km into Öresund. On a nautical chart, this symbol represents pipes. The sea chart maps out the position of the pipes laid by Supra in the late 1960s to pump dissolved gypsum into the sea. During Havsresan, one of my main goals was to investigate the location of these pipes and their current condition. The weekend before Havsresan kicked off, I met Andersson, commercial diver Göran Petersson, and a few other early-arrivals for dinner at a local pizza place. Andersson arrived carrying a small orange box. “You should have these as I don’t really need them anymore,“ he told me, passing the box across the table. Inside were dozens of small black-and-white photographs. Most of the images were taken by Andersson in the 70s and 80s: pictures of the Supra pipes just after they had been installed on the seabed; pictures of the larger outtake pipe further out to sea; pictures of a sunken boat they’d found in the sound; pictures of divers in wetsuits no-one would dare go cold-water diving in today (it’s all drysuit diving in this part of the world now). I later scanned Andersson’s photographs and donated copies of them to Landskrona Museum’s archive.

Later in the week, Petersson and I embarked on a covert mission to find the pipes. Rather than the exit

point, 4km out to sea, we decided to start from the input point on the island. I’m curious to find out more about their condition. Have they become damaged?

Will there be any sign of environmental contamination from leakages? Because of the extremely shallow depth around the west side of Gipsön, we couldn’t take a dive boat and so used a rigid inflatable boat (RIB) instead.

Petersson in full drysuit dive gear; me in a wetsuit and snorkel. Arriving at the location marked on the maps, we hopped out of the boat, both of us standing on the seabed, the water only waist-high. We searched for the pipes for over an hour, crossing back and forth over the line marked on the nautical chart, to no avail.

Although we found a couple of dead fish, some strange blue crabs, and a fairly listless-looking seabed, we found no trace of the pipes. Back on the boat, we speculated as to the reasons why. Perhaps the pipes had been removed, which seemed unlikely, or covered over by decades of shifting sands. Given that companies self-report the location of pipelines for nautical maps, Supra may have misrepresented their positioning. It’s hard to say for certain, but it’s frustrating. When it comes to seeking compensation or environmental restoration for industrial pollution there are endless challenges: lack of funds and resources, political or corporate obstruction. But lack of knowledge is also a frequent obstacle. Making a case for damages is often complicated by a simple lack of information.

The fact that we can’t even find the pipes to begin to assess their current status and impact is just one of many knowledge gaps in this particular story.

Today, Yara still retains responsibility for maintaining Gipsön. Although the island is off-limits to the public bar its two annual tours, Yara’s employees visit regularly to monitor the water purification plant and take groundwater measurements a few times per year. In the early 2000s, it was hoped that the purification work would have largely decontaminated the island’s water by 2012, thus making it “clean” enough to hand over to the city for management by 2020. At present, precise timings for this handover remain unknown. The city’s lack of resources (and perhaps political will) also make it difficult to know what exactly “clean” means when it comes to Gipsön.

No one really knows how much damage the island’s creation has caused to the surrounding sea. Given the large seal colony that lives off the island’s south-west coast and Gipsön’s surprising variety of flora and fauna (a small population of hares and pheasants live on the

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Unloading fertiliser in Landskrona harbour, February 1966. Reproduced as part of the series No Island Is An Island (photo: Anders Hilding/Landskrona Museum).

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Yara Factory Fence, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021. Includes archive photo of Öresund phosphogypsum output pipe taken by Kjell Andersson in the 1970s (printed on silk).

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Gipsön, from the series No Island Is An Island, 2021.

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island, presumably having crossed the ice during a winter freeze), it’s easy to assume that the impact has not been as dire as otherwise expected. A 2013 report by the World Maritime University, however, states that cadmium and mercury are still detectable in water

The county’s hands are tied by the fact that Supra had legal permission to dump its waste into the sea. In purely legal terms, it has done nothing wrong.

Towards the end of my time in Landskrona, I experiment with creating a series of colour photographic prints.

As a photographer, I work predominately with analogue film, and develop and print my images in a darkroom.

On my final trip to Gipsön, I bring a 5l bottle and fill it with seawater. Back in my studio, I submerge a large colour print of Gipsön’s containment pond in this water. After about a week, the layers of colour on the print begin to separate and degrade; the top layer of blue flaking off in strange patterns. It leaves blotches of red and yellow behind, like some kind of warning sign written into the surface of the image. E N D

samples, as well as in blue mussels surrounding the island. So often, pollution just isn’t visible.

Perhaps even more concerning is the future rehabilitation of the underwater dead-zone created by the mounds of settled phosphogypsum from the earlier waste-management system. A marine biologist from the County Administrative Board tells me that the situation is difficult, complicated by the fact that the true extent of the phosphogypsum’s current toxicity remain unknown. The biologist speaks of plans, for example, to transform the underwater phosphogypsum mounds into rock reefs, but it would be folly to drop large stones and spread the toxic waste further if it still contains substantial amounts of heavy metals.

The lack of information surrounding the mounds’ makeup is partly due to a lack of funds on the part of the county, whose hands are further tied by the fact that Supra had legal permission to dump its waste into the sea. It’s impossible to compel Yara to take financial responsibility for restoring the marine environment when, in purely legal terms, it has done nothing wrong. Until governments around the world legally mandate waste-management controls that prioritise human and environmental welfare, it is sadly and frustratingly likely that phosphogypsum, as with numerous other examples of industrial and chemical waste, will continue to pose problems. ***

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The Spicy Present Words India Block Photographs Dean Kaufman

Exactly what is MSCHF? It’s a question that troubles the press and fans alike. The New York Times hesitantly described the creative studio in a 2020 headline as a “Very Modern… Business?”. In media coverage, the studio’s name is prefaced with business-y words such as “company” and invariably described as a “start-up” that markets “viral pranks”. But these labels seem an awkward fit. Yes, MSCHF has publicly courted venture capital, is run out of an office in Brooklyn, and is staffed by young people in T-shirts, but it also has no logo, no one-note product, and seemingly no interest in making heaps of money.

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On Reddit, where the studio’s fans congregate to compare notes on releases, the meaning of MSCHF is a topic of debate. When I poke my nose into the forum, people are arguing over Drop #56, Boosted Packs, which promise a random assortment of trading card-style ephemera.

Tesla employee ID cards, Soho House membership chits, a Patrick Bateman business card. Some buyers are surprised to find only the meaningless detritus of capitalism inside their purchase. “STOP COMPLAINING,” posts username Bruhuha. “Don’t be mad that you opened up your packs and got junk from someones [sic] wallet, because literally they advertised that’s all they were. The whole point of MSCHF is to be a big joke on our cosumerist [sic] economy.”

Some of this confusion is intentional. Pronounced with all its missing vowels as mischief, the studio is Loki-like, a contemporary incarnation of the trickster god – a shape-shifter of a studio that delights in chaos.

Each new project arrives fully formed, featuring an attendant website with a custom URL bearing a carefully curated graphic identity. MSCHF borrows from the streetwear corner of fashion with its distribution model, dropping limited quantities of new items once a fortnight. They always sell out in minutes. They promise to never do the same thing twice. In the time elapsed between writing this article and its publication, they will likely have reinvented MSCHF twice over.

In the interests of editorial frankness, I’ve been a fangirl of the studio for a while. I get a kick out of its social experiment approach to design and find it refreshingly less po-faced than the design industry’s standard narrative of creatives earnestly setting out to save the world. I’m an anxious and depressed millennial that spends too much time online soaking in internet humour. I think MSCHF are punk, but for a time in which you have to interact with tech to get anything done. It grated on me that The New York Times would dismiss them as just a “business” marketing “viral pranks”, so I dropped MSCHF an email to ask them what they felt about the way the press talks about them – and how they’d describe the studio if pushed. “If we have to choose a single catch-all descriptor, we say that MSCHF drops are performance art using consumer culture, mass media, and celebrity as our artistic mediums,” co-chief creative officer Kevin Wiesner writes back. “To look at the things we put out into the world, which are narrative objects engineered to reach mass audiences and provoke conversation as a vehicle for our critiques and see them as something so straightforward as pranks is a terrible lack of critical thinking.” MSCHF online drops are Happenings for the digital age.

Performance art that you can buy into or simply marinade in the discourse around. You are sucked onto the virtual stage by purchasing the product, or reading about it online, or reading about the reaction of the people who are pissed off by the art online. If you’re fast enough on the draw to snag a MSCHF design, you can own art too – but watch out or you may become a part of the piece.

From their earliest works, MSCHF drops have been full of black humour and internet silliness. Drop #11 was Toaster Bath Bomb, a macabre glittery dissolvable bathwater accessory that was also a carefully attuned send-up of corporations trying to monetise the small joys required to survive under Disegno

A graffitied statue in the MSCHF studio.

capitalism. But the drops are a little bit serious too, accompanied by a manifesto that lays out exactly what systems-level wretchedness MSCHF means to skewer. Toaster Bath Bomb is accompanied by a ‘Memetic Analysis’, which traces its origins from the self care industrial complex (“Lush Bathbombs. If all you can sooth is your meat shell, then soothe it to excess”) to doomer memes (“The ‘Noo Don’t Kill Yourself You’re So Sexy Aha’ Snapchat meme presupposes both that it is not unusual for a casual Snapchat to discuss the possibility, and also flattens the dialogue into the same unremarkable horny-braindead patterns of late night flirtation”).

Suicidal ideation as a running joke and brands that capitalise on the endorphin rush of small, ephemeral products marketed as a balm for persistent low mood: these are heavy topics. But MSCHF wears them lightly, smuggling in its bitter subtext under a tasty layer of digital culture.

But don’t mistake the bleak subject matter for nihilism. “To critique how much the world sucks necessitates an acknowledgement that it could be better,” Wiesner tells me over email.

Critiquing consumer culture and capitalism is hardly a novel position for a contemporary critical design studio to adopt. But MSCHF punches through the conceptual-only approach by inviting everyone to pay-to-play and consume along at home. Simply text their number to get the link to download their app (natch) and, once a fortnight, you can try to buy whatever it is they’ve cooked up next. The studio uses its drop/manifesto model to hoist feel-good marketing, luxury fashion and the art market by their own petards. But just because it embraces digital distribution models and top-of-the-line graphics, the studio doesn’t spare the design world or the tech industry from satire and skewering. Enter drop #50, Dead Startups Toys, an adorable range of five miniature models that memorialised tech’s most egregious fuckups. The toys are Funko Pops for people with a Tech Won’t Save Us tote bag. Winged cherubs dancing on the product’s landing page are superimposed with the face of Elizabeth Holmes, who is now on trial for her part in Theranos, a scam blood-testing business. A miniature Juicero – the $400 WiFi-connected juice press that turned out just to squeeze out bags of pre-pressed pulp – is as much use as a real one, and a whole lot cheaper. A good “big joke on cosumerist [sic] culture” always punches up.

Overblown startup valuations bloated with venture capital, overnight crypto millionaires, every hobby a side hustle – sometimes it feels like everyone wants to get rich or buy trying. But Loki was the god of fire as well as mayhem, that promethean source of heat and light that can trigger alchemical reactions – or turn everything to ashes. MSCHF refuses to revere financially sacred objects, often destroying items deemed valuable by cultural association to create new works. Last year, the studio acquired a Damien Hirst Spot painting (L-Isoleucine T-Butyl Ester, 2018) for $30,485.

Enacting its own Judgement of Solomon, the studio cut it up into individual coloured dots so that 88 people could own a piece of one piece of art.

Sold as drop #20, Severed Spots lampooned the art world’s pipeline of manufacturing goods that go straight into bank vaults. “Maybe we don’t need more zombie wallworks,” reads its manifesto, “we just need to distribute the ones we’ve got.” Earlier this year, Birkinstocks (drop #39) 118

“To critique how much the world sucks necessitates an acknowledgment that it could be better” —Kevin Wiesner

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similarly saw the studio slice up $45,000 crocodile-skin Birkin bags, arm candy of choice for the super rich and famous, and turn them into pairs of Birkenstocks, the sturdy and affordable cork-soled norm core sandals beloved of hippies and lesbians (I’m a queer that makes my own granola and I own two pairs). “ADDITIONAL STEPS INCREASE RETAIL VALUE,” shouts the accompanying screed. “THEREFORE: MAKE LUXURY OBJECTS OUT OF OTHER COMPLETE OBJECTS.” MSCHF had to acquire its sacrificial leather goods on a resale site, as Hermès employs a scarcity model to push up the value of its Birkin bag.

MSCHF are well versed in the dark arts of going viral, so its collaboration early this year with Gen Z icon, musician and king internet troll Lil Nas X was a match made in heaven that raised hell. In the music video for ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’ Lil Nas X sings about gay sex as he snogs a penissnake, is stoned to death by butt plugs, then pole dances down to Hell in thigh-high patent boots to twerk on Satan before snapping his demonic neck.

It’s a masterpiece filled with religious iconography that rewards careful rewatches, and the eagle-eyed viewer can spot that the Devil himself is wearing custom black Nikes. Enter MSCHF, which created 666 pairs of trainers customised with a drop of blood contained within their air cushions and a silver pentagram charm. An Evangelical Christian pastor denounced the shoes as “devil-worshipping wicked nonsense”. Nike sued and MSCHF settled. Perhaps MSCHF’s approach to performance art as products is best summed up in its statement on the legal trouble, published 1 April: “There is no better way to start a conversation about consumer culture than by participating in consumer culture.”

Wiesner and MSCHF’s other CCO, Lukas Bentel, met in art school and used to run an artists’ group together called Hello Velocity before joining MSCHF CEO Gabriel Whaley. Bentel cites performance art influences such as The KLF – a 90s British electronic band that set fire to £1m on a Scottish island in a performance art action called K Foundation Burn A Million Quid – and Maurizio Cattelan, he of duct-taping-bananas-to-a-wall fame. Wiesner is also an admirer of Dunne & Raby, the progenitors of contemporary critical design and course leaders of the Royal College of Art’s influential Design Interactions MA between 2005 and 2015.

After our initial email conversation, I arrange a call with MSCHF’s two CCOs on Zoom. I’m eager to spy on their chosen backdrop for the call. Early press coverage of MSCHF delighted in the studio’s office, which proved catnip for millennial workers with its graffitied bathrooms and a meeting space dominated by a giant white pentagram marked up in white over a floor painted black, as if their ideas were being summoned from a Hellmouth.

I was hoping we could get some shots of it, enormously tickled by the element of foreshadowing given that MSCHF had played a crucial part in manifesting a very real satanic panic mere months before. But now, with fans desperate to preempt their every move, they’ve taken to guarding their secrets more carefully, concerned with preserving the crucial element of surprise of every new drop. Photographs inside are verboten. As they apologise politely, they describe the MSCHF studio as having a “black box policy”. At first I think it’s a malaphor for a black site – where governments and militaries secretly conduct nefarious deeds – but then Google informs 120

“There’s no better way to start a conversation about consumer culture than by participating in consumer culture.”

—MSCHF

me it’s a tech phrase: a term in computing and engineering where an output can be received without any knowledge of its internal workings.

MSCHF works in mysterious ways; the mystique must be maintained.

Scanning for clues during our video chat, I subtly try to decipher the scribbles on the whiteboard behind them, decode the meaning of obscure glyphs. One looks like a little bowl or a seashell, another like a Christmas cracker or maybe a miniature bear trap. I give up on trying to guess at the future. The conversation is too engaging for my eyes or brain to drift, anyway.

It’s the most energetic video conversation I’ve been on in a while. There is office hubbub outside the door and Slack, the office chat software, is running in the background, pranging out my attention economy-addled brain with its distinctive staccato clack-chirp. It’s early afternoon in New York City to my dark English evening, and Wiesner and Bentel bounce off each other with an easy familiarity that almost borders on a hivemind, finishing one another’s sentences and queuing up questions for each other, making my job as an interviewer almost ancillary. did MSCHF come to be? What’s your origin story? started in 2019. Lukas and I worked together ourselves before then, and the rest of the team were working by themselves as a group before then as well. But we came together as what MSCHF actually is in 2019. It came out of a few basic original tenets that we wanted to pursue, the first of which was very simple. We wanted a structure wherein we could make only the things we wanted to make. We wanted to see if we could build an audience around totally disparate things. Each drop would have nothing to do with each other. And the core framework that we set from ourselves at the get-go was, we’re gonna drop something once every two weeks, come hell or high water. And that’s gonna be our true, concrete starting point. Because other than that– Lukas Bentel We had nothing.

Kevin There might not be any obvious connection between projects. And it’s spiralled out of control from there. The original team was five or six, and we’re now up to 23. And when we look back at the past two years, we’ve actually averaged an output every 10 days for the past two years.

So we’re beating our own schedule fairly substantially. Still just chasing that high. We want bigger and bigger stuff each time.

India A launch every 10 days is an insane schedule. How do you guys manage that? And is that 10 days start to finish?

Lukas No, no, no, everything is planned out.

Kevin People think that from the outside. But that is absolutely not the case.

Lukas It would be impossible to do everything that we do with that timeline.

We’re almost a year planned out in terms of our drop schedule.

Kevin We have stuff planned through to August of next year. A lot of the things that come out have been in the works, in terms of design, anywhere from six to nine months. But that is kind of the magic of it when new work comes out back-to-back. “Oh, how did they do that in the timespan?”

It’s this magic thing called working on more than one project at once.

India Do you have any particular favourites from the projects that you’ve done in the past year?

A sword made from a melted gun as part of the buyback programme, Guns 2 Swords (drop #54).

India Block How

Kevin Wiesner MSCHF

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“Golf Sucks” trophy from a referrals reward scheme.

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Lukas Personally, Separate Spots was a great project. Because, in one sense,

that was one of our first art-specific projects. Kevin and I are coming more from that background. That was a project where we bought a Damien Hirst painting, chopped it up, and sold all the dots. It was one of these moments where we realised we did something where everyone else would have been really scared to touch an object like that and chop it up, because it seemed like a complete waste of money – and a terrible risk. But it solidified our “nothing is sacred” mentality.

Kevin I think Guns 2 Swords, in a lot of ways for us internally, represents a logistics high watermark. It was an idea that we had two years ago, practically right when the company started. The prospect of actually setting up a gun buyback programme, unaffiliated with a city or a police department or anything, was pretty daunting. It was in the works for a very long time. It feels to me like a real, tangible sign of our growth in terms of what we’re able to execute. And obviously, I love the fact that we’re making swords and have Grimes carrying them around.

India Did she give you a gun to melt down? And how did you land on its pulp fantasy book cover aesthetic – was it to appeal to the incel demographic?

Kevin It was not to appeal to the “incel demo” but because the aesthetic of pulp fantasy covers absolutely slaps. That said, it probably does help us appeal to the compensatory big dick energy of assault weapon owners, and in that sense serves the drop extremely well. Grimes did not give us a gun, alas. We lent her one of our prototype units for the Met Gala.

India But is it your favourite drop?

Kevin I hate this question, because as Lukas knows, I’m always obliged to give my honest answer about what my favourite drop is, which is the AI generated foot-pic bot. To me, it’s an excellent example of a general principle with MSCHF drops. We want them to have an immediate hit in one sentence, which is “AI foot-pic bot”, and also to hit harder in three sentences. That’s the rubric we use. If you dig into that drop, it is a vehicle for looking at the insane economic dynamics of feet pics, between being super valuable to some people and totally worthless to others. The people who are consuming them tend to be the people who think they’re super valuable, and the people producing them tend to think that they’re throwaway memes, which is a bizarre supply-demand dynamic. They’re also the perfect content to ghost through any censorship law that you’ve cared to devise for internet platforms, because it’s like, “What is this?”

To some people it is literal porn. And to some people, it’s like, “lmao [he pronounces the acronym “la mao”, rhymes with “ow”, ed.] that’s a pic of a foot”. Which is great. Feet pics sit at the focal point of so many core internet content dynamics, I think they’re really interesting. But I always sort of resent that this question turns me into the foot pic guy every time.

Lukas I think the most interesting thing about that project is that you can text it for foot pics, but it is tackling all these questions. If you go to the site, there’s a pretty lengthy description of those interesting economic thoughts around foot pics, and the social dynamics and the technology.

You could write an article about that same subject matter, and maybe in a certain publication you can get 10,000 people looking at it. This foot bot with this text has literally been texted multiple millions of times. It’s Disegno

Kevin Wiesner.

Card v Card (drop #29), a multiplayer game where contestants received debit cards tied to one bank account and then raced to make IRL transactions.

a reach thing. With a lot of the projects we try to take some concept, take some thought, and start a conversation and move it as far into culture as possible. As opposed to just talking about it over here, then maybe not engaging with the actual phenomena or group that you’re actually talking about or critiquing, we made something to push into that space.

Kevin It’s an extremely good Trojan Horse vehicle for the conversation that we want to have. But also hyper-tailored to the audience that’s engaging with, in this case, feet.

India Did Damien Hirst ever respond to you cutting up his artwork?

Lukas He never did. The Spot paintings are him just printing money.

He probably doesn’t even give a shit about them. He already made his money from that piece.

Kevin Right. We did have a group of folks come through the office one day, and two of them turned out to be friends of his. They were just along for the ride to see who was cutting up the painting, which was amusing.

India But with Spot’s Rampage, that definitely provoked a response from Boston Dynamics.

Lukas We got a Boston Dynamics robot, we put a paintball gun on it, we put it in a space, and let people control it from their own home with their phones. The craziness happened even before the project launched. We set up the project and talked to some press about it beforehand, and some of them ended up contacting Boston Dynamics, who really freaked out. They made this whole public statement saying that, while they believe in freedom of expression, etc etc, they think that this is bad positioning.

Kevin I think they said “We condemn any use of our robots in a context that’s associated with violence”. That was their wording, approximately.

Lukas And of course that was the Barbra Streisand effect [when trying to suppress information backfires and elicits furious internet speculation where it may only have been lukewarm prior, ed.] and it becomes so much bigger than it actually was. In some sense they made the story, because they were engaging with it.

Kevin They offered us two free robots if we would take the gun off the thing.

Lukas We said no, even though that would have been very nice financially, but we launched the project anyway. They got some bad press for it, but to be honest the robot doesn’t even work.

Kevin The thing is, they shoot their own sizzle reels. But when you actually get this thing, it can walk forward and backwards, turn left and right, and it can move at a top speed of three miles an hour.

Lukas It’s really slow.

Kevin It’s still scary when it points the gun at you – there’s something really off-putting about that experience. But they have to constantly hype up their own robot, which really made the project. The other thing that they did, which was so ludicrous – we didn’t plan this, it just happened to be the day after the drop – was that the Spot robot got rolled out in the Bronx in a partnership with the New York Police Department. We’re sitting over here, reading the statement that says you can’t use the robot near a gun or in a context associated with violence, and there’s an armed patrol 30 minutes north of us right now which has the robot? Ridiculous. You always hope for reactions that add to the concept and boy, they sure did. We 124

Lukas Bentel.

“We try to take some concept, take some thought, and start a conversation and move it as far into culture as possible.”

—Lukas Bentel

connected the robot to WiFi several months later and it started an automatic software update, and we found out that they changed our operating licence to expire in 1969. So the robot is just bricked.

Lukas They shut our robot off.

India Probably my favourite thing that you’ve done was Dead Startup Toys.

Kevin That was a fun one and it’s interesting from an audience perspective as well, because we took internal bets on which of the failed startups people were going to most recognise the most. We were completely wrong.

Lukas In terms of which ones sold out quicker.

Kevin Dead Startup toys is that collection of companies that represents a snapshot in time to me. Okay, wow, this was what Silicon Valley was doing for about a year-long period.

Lukas They were trying to save the world. They did all this– Kevin Garbage. But, the thought process that led to something like the Juicero is a kindred spirit to how MSCHF thinks, except without any sort of satirical remove. When we talk about the intensification of the present, all of those Dead Startups represent that very well. That’s part of why we like them. It’s so funny that when we’re doing the background research, you find out how many of those are funded by the same people, even designed by the same people. I think Yves Béhar is represented in at least three of them [Béhar designed the Juicero and the XO Laptop, and helped with the casing for Theranos’s Edison machine, ed.].

Lukas It’s hilarious.

Kevin The legacy that they leave is not good, but it is coherent across them.

India Do you have an audience in mind when you’re making things? Do you know who is signing up to the drops, who’s texting for the feet pics?

Lukas The fan base does not affect what we make. We have no idea– Kevin We have so little data about who the fan base is. Drops do accumulate totally different audiences from each other. Each time a drop comes out, there will be some group of people who think, “Oh, this was made just for me, I am MSCHF’s core demographic”. We did this project Mickey 2024 recently, which was all about poking and prodding the bear that is US copyright law and Disney. And Law Twitter loved this, they got such a kick out of it. Over time, this adds up to a totally wacky collection of people, from five-year-old kids to 65-year-old art collectors. We got to see it in person for the first time just recently. We did a pop-up called 8-Twelve, which was a fully rebranded, really spooky, bootleg 7-Eleven. It was a physical installation in the Lower East Side and it was fantastic. It was up for two days and we had 100 people lined around the block both days.

Looking at who was standing in that line was hilarious, you have everyone from the dripped-out kids to the suited-up ad execs who were following us out of academic interest. You have the cool art kids – maybe that was just because it was in the Lower East Side. It’s such a bizarre mash-up of folks, because everyone finds their own entry point from the drop that they like most, which is nothing like what somebody else came in with. The kids who came in from Satan Shoes are nothing like the people who came in from the Foot Bot, for example. I mean, I think that’s awesome. At the end of the day, it is not like we have a core demographic that we’re trying to cater to. It’s not top down, like, “All right, we need to go after people ages Disegno

25 to 34 with disposable income”. It’s very much emerging from the things that we’re putting out, which is a lot nicer as a way to work, I would say.

Lukas We want to make the interesting things that we want to make. We don’t want to be looking at the people looking at us, trying to figure out what they want. That just feels like a bad way to work.

India The graphic identities for each drop are so different, which I think helps make them distinct when people come across MSCHF for the first time. How do you go about planning that?

Lukas That is very specific to one part of MSCHF, where we say that MSCHF can fit anywhere seamlessly. We want to feel – when we’re making something and trying to go into that space – that it exists and that we could fit in as seamlessly as possible. To that end, we have no specific MSCHF branding, because that would be counterintuitive. Every single drop is completely rebranded. It’s its own experience. It’s tackling a different audience, it’s going in a different space. Every drop ends up looking completely different, as part of the way we think about these projects.

Kevin We consciously said at the beginning, let’s see what happens if we just don’t have a logo. We’ll just try to build an identity out of a point of view and a sense of humour. Because we’re trying to choose aesthetics and cultural elements to Trojan Horse our way into different parts of culture, it is very helpful to not have anything fixed. All the aesthetics are just tools to help the concepts.

Lukas They are the pieces of the palette that we can use.

India Using humour as a medium must be hard, because it’s difficult to get right. Especially internet humour, which moves quite fast. How do you keep ahead of that?

Lukas We were talking about this the other day. We are not reactionary.

Obviously, our projects are reacting to the world. But we’re not reactionary to the extent that I think a lot of other people are where they’re on social media and they’re responding to the latest and greatest things because of the timelines. We are purposefully completely off platforms. We’re not really on Instagram, we’re not really on Twitter. We have our handles there, but we don’t want to use them as channels.

Kevin It just flattens everything.

Lukas It puts everything in a box that we don’t want to exist in. Our timelines for reacting to things are much longer.

Kevin They are abstracted one level higher from individual instances.

Boston Dynamics is a decent example, because they’re something that’s been in and out of people’s attention over the span of a few years. But that as a trend is different from the specific day that they rolled out in the Bronx. With regard to humour, a lot of what we’re doing is just taking the present and making it more so. It’s a little accelerationist, it’s a little absurdist and solutionist. A lot of what we do is to look at what exists and then extrapolate it to its logical endpoint. And that turns out to be often hilarious.

Lukas We often say the spicy present.

Kevin It’s not about the future, it’s about the spicy present.

Lukas There are a lot of people that are like, “Let’s think about what’s going to change in the future,” but there is already a bunch of really crazy shit 126

Above: a copy of MSCHF Mag Volume 5: BAM (drop #58).

Right: “Impossible” patchwork T-shirt, one of 1,000 garments made from cut-up clothes from 10 streetwear brands (drop #25).

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that’s going on right now. Let’s just take it, digest it and spit it back out, but slightly heightened.

Kevin Especially when it comes to celebrity and disruption.

Lukas The material that we’re playing with is something that I don’t really know whether any other groups are playing with it in the same way.

Kevin When you say “material”?

Lukas Like when we see a celebrity, or a Nike shoe, or a Birkin bag, we look at this as material that we can play with. These are all objects and symbols that exist. When you walk outside, you see Nike shoes. Maybe if you look online, and you see some really wealthy people, you’ll see Birkin bags.

The materials that we’re playing with are materials that everybody engages with day to day. We try to actively use those objects in the works, and we’re not just making jokes about those objects. We’re not writing about those things, we are actively taking those things and smashing them together into interesting narrative objects.

Kevin That process in terms of readymades, but using cultural phenomena.

Lukas Cultural readymades.

India Do you have budget constraints to work with?

Kevin The thing that we don’t have, which is very freeing, is an obligation that drops necessarily have to make money. Some of them do, and some of them don’t. That’s an incredible degree of freedom. Also, when you put out stuff that very obviously has no profit motive, it just makes people’s brains explode.

Lukas It’s funny, in the art world, if you see an artist and their whole practice is doing performance art you’re like, “Oh, okay, that’s cool. I understand that.” But then if you do something that engages with people in a commercial or pop culture space that doesn’t obviously make money, people are like “Wait”. There’s that split.

Kevin No one looks at Marina Abramović sitting down for The Artist is Present for 12 hours– Lukas Saying, “That doesn’t make any money”.

Kevin “She’s not getting paid, she’s just sitting in a chair.” But that doesn’t bother anybody.

India Do you have any themes or particular subjects that you’re interested in exploring next?

Lukas There’ll be some more art world stuff.

Kevin We will not tell you anything specific, I’m afraid. But we have themes that we run with, some of which are fine art, some of which are subverting or using the idea of celebrity and celebrity culture for our own ends.

We have a couple of fun ones in that vein. We’re doing some consumable products for the first time, which is a big one for us. We haven’t done that before.

Lukas There may be some more foot-related stuff.

Kevin Can’t rule it out. E N D

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A fridge decorated with a “voice activated” sticker given away in copies of MSCHF Mag.

23.09.2021 > 06.03.2022

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