Disegno #38

The Journal of Design #38 Short stories about memory and design Autumn 2024

Find an authorised dealer near you at CARLHANSEN.COM

Flagship Store, London 48A Pimlico Rd, London SW1W 8LP

Opala Lighting Series

Hans J. Wegner

SHAPES OF ILLUMINATION The Opala Lighting Series was designed by Hans J. Wegner in 1973 to shape atmospheres through pleasant, subdued lighting. The series comprises a pendant, table-, and floor lamp recognised by an asymmetrical, almost futuristic shape. Each lamp provides a focused task light while softly illuminating the surrounding space through the frosted lampshade.

1973

Nike Form Follows Motion 21.09.2024 – 04.05.2025

#VDMNike #VitraDesignMuseum www.design-museum.de

4

Mementos Words Oli Stratford

One of my earliest memories is of waking up in the quiet of Christmas Eve night, clambering from my bed, and toddling to my bedroom window. From there, I saw Father Christmas sailing across the night in his superb sleigh. Although he must have been very many miles away, he nevertheless shouted out words to the effect of: “Oh, hello Oliver, enjoy all your presents tomorrow!”

Over the years, this memory has been questioned by every person with whom it has been shared, and I am happy to admit that it demands critical attention, as certain aspects of the tale are strange, fabulous, and undeniably dynamic on my part. Personally, I think the most likely explanation for my experience is that I had been the world’s Best Boy that year, so Father Christmas was contractually obliged to do a meet-andgreet. But assuming that this wasn’t the case, what else could have been going on? A commercial airliner coupled with surging levels of festive hype? CIA black ops above the skies of West Yorkshire? The laughable idea that I dreamed the whole thing? My own father, yet airborne?

We shall simply never know.

I bring all this up because you currently hold in your hands the Memory issue of Disegno, part of a new series Memory

in which the journal will be investigating different themes within design and how they shape contemporary practice.

Memory, in this regard, represents fertile ground. It can inspire, reinforce, recall, deceive, aggrandise, diminish, celebrate and obscure. Its impact on design practice is unpredictable, yet often decisive; what we remember of our past – and also what we may not remember or else elide and suppress – helps to determine how we design our present and future.

Within this copy of Disegno are 13 stories, each of which interprets the theme through a different lens.

There is memory manifest as archive, as database, memorial, material, nostalgia and more. Together, they do not present an exhaustive or comprehensive account of memory’s impacts on design, but rather a collection of unashamedly personal stories about how memory has affected their subjects, writers and photographers.

These short stories are variously poignant, reflective, melancholic and optimistic, and ones that we hope may provoke, entertain and challenge. Nevertheless, they are all also stories that are demonstrably inferior to my own account of how I saw Father Christmas, inasmuch as they lack its nuance, mystery and thrilling holiday setting. As such, it’s all downhill from here.

Still, we’ll always have the memories.

6

Contents 38

At Sea Jaywick Sands, seaside nostalgia, and Hat Projects’s Sunspot business centre

49

Thirsty Designers from ECAL water their expandable cellulose furniture

57

Sketches of Utopia from Hell Desecrated memorials and the preservation of Erich Mendelsohn’s first building

Preteen Dreams The digital legacies of Tamagotchi

64

Do Androids Dream of Acid House?

AI-generated sonic architecture from Yuri Suzuki

A Place We Wish to Be Planting a new world with indigenous seeds

71

A Wellspring Cave_bureau’s study of architecture’s history and the future of Mount Suswa

5

Introduction Mementos

8

Contents

10

Contributors

12

Masthead The people behind Disegno

15

Kyu-Ikeda-Tei Architect Yui Tezuka’s tales of her childhood home

24

31

8

80

Everyday Treasure Everyday ephemera from four decades of artist Nigel Shafran’s practice

97 Ancestors in the Making Stephen Burks Man Made reflects on design as a form of spiritual armour 105

Factory Diaries Folkform’s ode to Sweden’s last Masonite factory

112

From the Ground Up Smelling and scuffing generations of linoleum with Christien Meindertsma

120

Give Us This Day Our Daily Watts Industrial Facility’s Powerbox makes energy output physical

DISCOVER RADIUS DOOR, SELF SUSPENDED CABINET, MODULOR WALL PANELLING SYSTEM, SIXTY COFFEE TABLE. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

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

Contributors Darran Anderson is digging an escape route out of London. p. 57

Kane Hulse is bathing in Corsican bandit country. p. 120

Ellen Peirson enjoys long walks on the beach. p. 38

Frank Broughton is dancing like no-one’s watching (they’re looking away in horror). p. 64

Mathijs Labadie thinks colour blindness makes for strange rainbows. p. 112

Alfred Quartey is ready for the rainy season to end and for mango season to begin. p. 31

Helen Gonzalez Brown is giving all her Tamagotchis to Mélodie. p. 24

Magnus Laupa is forced by Folkform to work with an analogue Pentax 67 and 120mm-film, but he loves it. p. 105

Jim Stephenson is clinging to summer like a life raft. p. 38

Jasmine Deporta is constantly seeking the raw honesty of film grain. p. 49

Malika Leiper is searching for the perfect cadmium red. p. 97

Oli Stratford has spent this year obsessing over the Brontës. p. 49 and 120

Albie Fay is dangerously close to drowning in sun cream. p. 105

Lutivini Majanja is a leading expert on Nairobi’s night life. p. 71

Edmund Sumner has been running fast to stay still since 1997. p. 15

Brandon Forrest Frederick is too tall for his own good. p. 97

Kitya Mark is currently wearing electric blue mascara. p. 112

Yuki Sumner is SUPing on Lake Nojiri, home of the Japanese wooly mammoth. p. 15

Anna Holmquist is playing on her brown piano (disturbing the neighbours). p. 105

Fowota Mortoo can be found imparting pieces of wisdom from the Ratatouille screenplay in daily conversation. p. 31

Najha Zigbi-Johnson is probably sitting in some park right now. p. 97

Rogers Ouma could not be reached. p. 71

10

The Journal of Design #38 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com Assistant editor Helen Gonzalez Brown helen@disegnojournal.com Proofreader Yuna Goda Editorial interns Albie Fay Ella North

Cover The cover shows a photograph shot

by Jasmine Deporta as part of ECAL’s Under Pressure Solutions project.

It depicts Chris Kabel’s design for a cellulose sponge vase.

Contributors Darran Anderson, Frank Broughton, Helen Gonzalez Brown, Jasmine Deporta, Albie Fay, Brandon Forrest Frederick, Anna Holmquist, Kane Hulse, Mathijs Labadie, Magnus Laupa, Malika Leiper, Lutivini Majanja, Kitya Mark, Fowota Mortoo, Rogers Ouma, Alfred Quartey, Ellen Peirson, Jim Stephenson, Oli Stratford, Edmund Sumner, Yuki Sumner and Najha Zigbi-Johnson.

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Pureprint on Mohawk Options PC100 White Vellum 120gsm; Colorplan Bright White, Embossing - Granular 135gsm; and G . F Smith Max 115gsm, all by G . F Smith. The cover is printed on Colorplan Rust 270gsm, also by G . F Smith.

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

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

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Distribution and stockist enquiries MMS London info@mmslondon.co.uk

Fact checker Paul Fleckney

Thanks Many thanks to G . F Smith for kindly providing paper for this issue of the journal; Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi for leading us into the crater of Mount Suswa; Malika Leiper and Stephen Burks for their support; Carsten Krohn for his generosity; and Alice Dousova and Mélodie for all of their Tamagotchi insights.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made this issue of Disegno possible – not least to Izzy the cat, who has been muscling in on Annie’s territory.

Finally we are sad to say goodbye to Evi Hall, who has been one of the great pillars of Disegno during her time with the journal. We will miss her kindness, optimism, talent as a writer, sense of humour, and astonishing ability to organise even the most disorganised members of the team. We wish her luck in the next steps in her career.

12

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.

Contact us 50 Wenham House Ascalon Street London SW8 4DZ disegnojournal.com Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works.

STOCKHOLMFURNITUREFAIR.SE

Stockholm Furniture Fair 25.02.04–08

The 2025 edition is dedicated to the diverse landscape of ­design,­merging­­influences­ from­all­creative­fields,­ ­including­fashion,­artisan­ craft,­art,­and­architecture.­ We­are­proud­to­host­Faye­ Toogood­as­our­20th­Guest­ of­Honour.­Since­1951,­we­ have­brought­­together­the­ ­foremost­­furniture­brands,­ designers, and architects for a­week­of­news,­inspiration,­ and­­innovation.­Join­us­for­ a­fair­where­both­business­ and transformative ideas take­­centre­stage.

Kyu-Ikeda-Tei Words Yuki Sumner Photographs Edmund Sumner

Engawa House, designed by Tezuka Architects.

Memory

“My room came with tatami mats and an oshi-ire [a large closet reserved for futons]. I eventually got a desk and a bed. It had an engawa [balcony] facing the garden, connected to another set of engawa via a few stairs – hmm, actually, that was more like a deck, not engawa. Shoji paper doors divided my room and my family’s living room, which dropped down about a metre from my room.”

a mall for your neighbourhood, an airport to take you on holiday, or a bridge that lets you cross a deep ravine.

Tezuka, for instance, says that she has retained many vivid memories of her childhood home, which manifest in the buildings she designs today. “Houses are the starting point of our designs,” the landing page of Tezuka Architects’ website reads. “We consider them the basis of all architecture.”

Tezuka’s dream of becoming an astronaut would be dashed as she grew older,2 but she has never lost her fascination with getting closer to the sky – or indeed, the universe – via a rooftop. Many of her contemporary projects dismantle the norms and function of a roof as a simple protective shield from the elements, and instead turn it into a platform for people to come together, play and enjoy the sun, the trees, the ocean, or whatever else is nearby. Her Fuji Kindergarten (2007) in Tokyo, for example, has a doughnut-shaped rooftop where children can get up and run around freely. They’re also able to climb up a giant tree that Tezuka left poking through the nursery’s roof, which is protected by a net below.

“Children love running around in circles – I know this from experience,” Tezuka told an audience in April 2024 when she lectured at London’s Barbican Centre alongside her husband, Takaharu Tezuka. “I used to run in circles at my home in Japan.” Tezuka’s childhood home – Kyu-Ikeda-Tei (“kyu” = “old”, “tei” = “residence”), as she calls it – no longer exists. Her father, Katsuya Ikeda, lives in the same spot today, but in a much larger house that can accommodate a multigenerational household. Tezuka’s brother, Motoki, and his family have moved in to be closer to his father; Tezuka’s mother, Chikako, passed away about five years ago.

Kyu-Ikeda-Tei was big by the standards of the time, although not ostentatiously so. Tezuka was proud of the house. It was built from timber like other buildings in the neighbourhood, but was still distinct in its shape.3 In fact, Tezuka has an architectural model of the house

Yui Tezuka, co-founder of Tokyo’s Tezuka Architects, is describing her childhood room, which was built in a suburb of Fujisawa in Kanagawa prefecture, Japan.

Tezuka tells me that she couldn’t sit still when she was young. The architect becomes more animated as she describes the garden: the fun of “getting muddy” in the sandpit, which was made by her architect father, or else crawling between the pilotis that propped up the house, an architectural feature made popular by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, who completed the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo in 1959, not long before Tezuka’s house was built in 1968.

Tezuka used to climb up onto the rooftop, which spanned the full width of the house in one sweep. Did she get into trouble for this? “Not at all!” she shakes her head, surprised that I even asked. “You had to be careful when you climbed the roof as it was made with metal sheets, so it could get very hot in the sun,” she adds. Tezuka would go up on the roof at night to study the constellations. “I was doing my homework!”

Tezuka dreamed of becoming an astronaut one day.

Can memory serve as a design tool? Certainly, the ability to recall yourself as a child is a skill that can help fill in the gaps between you and other people. Memory can inform empathy, aiding your ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes and understand their needs and wants, which are usually more explicitly and freely expressed in childhood than in adulthood. The child you remember is not who you see in the mirror today, but recalling them can evoke profound emotions of nostalgia, sympathy, curiosity and wonder. It might give you something akin to what poet Y. B. Yeats termed “the centre” in his 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’:1 a grounding perspective or moral compass from which to connect with others and assess the impact of your work on the world, especially its emotional, social or environmental impact. It is, I believe, an attribute that you’d want in a designer, especially in an architect, who might be designing your house, a school for your child,

1 “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” – W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, 1919.

2 She says that she became violently ill after taking a ride on a glider in England.

3 Postwar Japan faced an acute housing shortage and homes had to be built quickly and economically, en masse. It meant that suburban houses looked exactly like one another: two storeys in height, all facing south, with a small garden, and a veranda jutting out of the second floor where clothes and futons could be air-dried.

16

Kyu-Ikeda-Tei, the home that Yui Tezuka grew up

Yui Tezuka (right), photographed with her brother Motoki

in, designed by her father, Katsuya Ikeda

(left) and a friend (image: courtesy of Yui Tezuka).

(image: courtesy of Yui Tezuka).

that she made when she was about 11 for a summer holiday project. “My mother had to help me make some furniture as I ran out of time, but I made most of it by myself,” she tells me.

The model’s slanted roof top comes off, revealing a neat row of rooms inside – starting with the kitchen and bathroom at one end, a large living room in the middle, Tezuka’s tatami room followed by her brother’s, then their parents’ bedroom, and, finally, her father’s study at the other end. All the rooms are connected by engawa on the side of the garden and by a long corridor on the side of the street, which Tezuka found scary given that it was dark and gloomy, with only a narrow horizontal slit running along the bottom of the wall. “I used to get my brother to accompany me to walk down to the end of the corridor,” she says. Come to think of it, you won’t find any dark corridors in Tezuka’s architecture.

Young Tezuka did not forget to draw the shoji doors on the wall between the family’s living room and her own room in her model either. She grew up sensing her family’s presence nearby at all times. “That’s why I can’t keep any secrets!” she chuckles. Many years later, Tezuka would emulate this intimacy in the design of her own home, which she shares with Takaharu and their two children. The bedrooms are placed neatly

4 Kofun are ancient burial mounds that are found all over Japan.

They usually date back to between the 3rd and 7th century CE.

side by side at one end of their open-plan, secondfloor flat, separated by thin plywood walls. Built on a kofun4 in Denenchofu – one of the most exclusive residential neighbourhoods in Tokyo – and raised above a ground-floor flat occupied by Tezuka’s in-laws, their house, as I recall, has a gentle breeze created by cross-ventilation, as well as an incredible view of the city, with skyscrapers in the distance.

Tezuka says that she was mischievous when she was young. She got into trouble at school once and decided to go into hiding. She pretended that she had left the house, but in fact was hiding under it next to the pilotis, her room floating above her head.

“Apparently I was good at cheating,” she remembers.

“If I came across a difficult question during a test, I would simply shout out to the class: ‘DOES ANYONE KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION?’ My mum was mortified.”

Tezuka was educated at a private Catholic girls school, which had an “escalator system” that advanced students from primary school all the way to university without ever needing to take an entrance exam. It was a system that avoided shiken jigoku, or “exam hell”, which most children in Japan face, including Tezuka’s own brother who stayed in the state education system.

“My mum probably thought it would be better for me,” she tells me, “as she also went to a private school.”

Through this system, Tezuka would have eventually enrolled in Seisen University, a women’s liberal arts college in Shinagawa, Tokyo, but she didn’t go through

Memory

with it – “I didn’t want to go to an all-girls college!” – and instead applied to study architecture at Tokyo University. She failed the entrance exam.

Now considered a ronin, a term applied to those who fail exams, Tezuka moved into her father’s study, which was at the far end of the house. After spending a year surrounded by architectural magazines and books collected by her father, she successfully passed her entrance exam to study architecture at Musashi Institute of Technology (now Tokyo City University), where she met her future husband.

Ikeda studied architecture at Meiji University under Yuichiro Kojiro, an architectural historian and critic who wrote books such as Forms in Japan (1963), and architect Sutemi Horiguchi, who founded Bunriha Kenchikukai (the Secessionist Architecture Group) in 1920, at the height of the Taisho democracy.6 The Secessionist Architecture Group wanted to distance itself from the past and forge a new path (or identity) for Japanese architects, searching for ways in which traditional Japanese architectural styles, such as the 16th-century Sukiya style7 (a subject Horiguchi would later write a book on), could be elegantly merged with the latest architectural trends from the west.8 “I went to Kyoto with Prof Kojiro and Prof Horiguchi on a study tour once,” Ikeda recalls.

“We visited a Tai-an, a Sukiya-style tearoom purported to be the work of the 16th-century grand tea master Sen no Rikyū. We would engage for hours discussing all the characteristics and traits that made this tearoom irrefutably the work of Rikyū.”

Ikeda assisted Horiguchi as a site manager for one of the campus buildings he was designing at Meiji University.9 “Prof Horiguchi liked bright colours; he would suggest applying bright green or turquoise for pillars and floors. I think he was the greatest influence for me,” Ikeda reminisces. He shows me a book that was gifted to him by Horiguchi on his wedding day, including a tanka poem that Horiguchi had written for him inside.

Ikeda expressed his taste for colour in his own interior work, such as Café Lawn (1954) in Yotsuya, central Tokyo: a café described as “a classic kissaten

Tezuka may have been mischievous as a child, but her antics were largely confined to the haven of her home.

The house consumed Tezuka in a good way: it kept her busy, out of trouble. She knew all of its various nooks and crannies.

“Do you know the term ‘sewari’?” she asks me during our Zoom call. “It’s a vertical slit you make in a timber log to facilitate its drying process. We had a few round pillars inside our house, one between my room and my brother’s and another one in the corner of our living room – you see?” Tezuka is pointing at the photo of her model to show me where the pillars are. “The gap in these pillars was just large enough to slip my fingers in and I would climb all the way to the top!”

Earlier this year, I was fortunate enough to also interview Tezuka’s father on Zoom and ask him about the house he designed for his family. Ikeda is now 86, but looks much younger and is very chatty. He starts our interview by describing the house as an architect might: “I ran a couple of steel bars where I placed the carport. I had to put storage there, as well as a septic tank.”5 Perhaps the greatest gift Tezuka’s father bestowed on his daughter was the unlimited access he gave her to explore and experience the family house inthe way she wanted – if she fancied crawling under the house, she could; if she fancied running along its engawa terraces or climbing its pillars, she could; if she fancied getting up on the roof, of course, she could do that also. I imagine Kyu-Ikeda-Tei brimming with possibilities, its capacity for unlimited play fostering deep learning for Tezuka.

Ikeda’s parental style, which encouraged the growth and development of a young mind, may have been influenced by the way he was taught by his own teachers, who had pioneered a new direction in architecture.

5 On-site sanitation systems (Johkasou) were common in Japan until they were replaced by public wastewater systems in densely populated areas by the late 1980s. Individual septic tanks are still widely used in Japan, however, especially in sparsely populated rural areas, and still account for about 30 per cent of total sanitation coverage.

6 A brief period of peace dating roughly from 1905 to 1925, before the rise of fascism in Japan, which took the country to war.

7 Buildings in Sukiya style are typically constructed in timber, with wood left in a natural state to emphasise harmony with nature.

Sukiya walls are typically made of clay, and great attention is paid to detail and proportions.

8 The Peace Tower that Horiguchi designed for the 1922 Peace Commemorative Exposition in Ueno Park, Tokyo, was inspired by the Wedding Tower that Joseph Maria Olbrich designed for Darmstadt, Germany, which was completed in 1908.

9 Horiguchi was responsible for the design of some of the school buildings at Meiji University, including No 2 Building on Izumi campus, which was completed in 1960. The campus building was demolished in 2022, despite it being registered with Docomomo Japan as historically significant and masterfully designed.

18

Tezuka’s childhood model of Kyu-Ikeda-Tei.

[tearoom] that’s seemingly straight out of a Haruki Murakami novel” in a 2023 article in Tatler Asia.

A photo of the space shows a bolt of sunlight shining through a narrow, double-height window and the entrance door. A corridor, meanwhile, cuts through the middle section of the café, flanked by vermillion leather booth seats and darkly painted timber walls, with a spiral staircase tucked away at the end. The café’s interior has remained exactly as Ikeda designed it over half a century ago, and some of the details were inspired by the Tai-an tea room, such as an aversion to sharp corners. “Good architecture should let you move your body freely, without you becoming conscious about [the movement],” he says.

Due to budgetary constraints, Kyu-Ikeda-Tei was more muted than Café Lawn in colour and materials.

Tezuka’s mother, Chikako, however, was there to brighten up the house. “She always wore colourful kimonos,”

Tezuka remembers. “Her kimonos…” Ikeda sighs, “are just sitting in the closet these days.”

Tezuka might not wear colourful kimonos like her mother did, but she does always wear red. Her partner Takaharu, meanwhile, sticks to blue, with these colours having established themselves after the couple went to live in the UK in the early 90s. Tezuka studied with Ron Herron at UCL Bartlett, while Takaharu joined Richard Rogers’ office, working on projects including Heathrow Terminal 5. Indeed, visiting the house that Rogers designed for his parents in Wimbledon proved to be a pivotal moment in Tezuka’s life. “I remember Richard’s mother greeting us in a bright green dress,” she says. “It was so vivid, seeing her against those yellow walls, matching the greenery outside. It was so beautiful.” Rogers himself was apparently influenced by his mother’s love of bright colours. “She was ‘a very elegant and a very beautiful woman’,” wrote Rowan

Memory

The Fuji Kindergarten, designed by Tezuka Architects.

Moore in The Observer back in 2013. “He recalls being embarrassed, in the drab years of postwar austerity, when she turned up at the school gate in dazzling clothes, but their influence has stuck.”

There is a sensual side to Tezuka’s architecture, one that is not necessarily expressed in its colour, but through the physical sensations afforded by its open structures. Walls, for instance, disappear to allow a breeze to come through, because “architectural ideas and concepts should be felt”, Tezuka says, “not explained in words”. She adds that “clients give us ideas. We are led by our clients. We never tell them what to do.” Roof House (2001) in Hadano City, Kanagawa Prefecture, for instance, includes eight skylights, each of which is equipped with a ladder so that the family can access the roof from any of them. “Roof House came about because our clients told us that they liked to relax on the roof of their

old house, which was easily accessed from the upstairs room,” Tezuka tells me. “We then came up with the idea of a big roof for the family to have a picnic on.”

Roof House caught people’s imagination and led to larger commissions, such as the Fuji Kindergarten.

One of the practice’s more recent projects includes a commission for Tokyo’s Play! Museum and its Play!

Park (2020): a space that bills itself as “not a playground with readymade playground equipment and toys”, but rather a site in which children are encouraged to “encounter the unknown”. Here, the studio responded by placing “a large dish” in the middle of a large room, in which children are encouraged to engage in any kind of play by “thinking for themselves”. Similar themes are at play in the Tezukas’ plans for a new learning centre for the Jhamtse Gatsal community in rural Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India. Their design for the space 20

The interior of Engawa House.

shows ripples of circles – rounded classroom buildings that seem to spin off a cliff-edge. This design was led by how the children sit in small circles in their classes so that no one feels left out.

My favourite project of Tezuka Architects, however, is Engawa House (2003), which has an affinity with Kyu-Ikeda-Tei in size, material and structure. It was designed for a multigenerational household in the Adachi district of Tokyo. Instead of demolishing their existing house, which had become too small for a growing family, the architects built a separate house for the younger family members on a new adjacent plot. Equipped with large window panels, the new house opens out across a garden to the original, which is occupied by the senior members of the family.

“It doesn’t actually have an engawa, you know,” Tezuka tells me. “Instead, the whole house becomes one once you open all the windows.” In this way, Tezuka

has managed to create a sense of closeness for the family, resembling the intimacy that was created long ago in her childhood home in Fujisawa, designed by her father Ikeda. The relatively low-rise structure of Engawa House allows sunlight to reach both the older home and the garden between the two, where the young and old can come together. There it is: Tezuka’s childhood home, shining brilliantly through a design that aims to deepen family connections, providing them with a centre that can hold. E N D Yuki Sumner is a British-Japanese architectural writer, historian and curator.

Edmund Sumner is an architectural photographer based in London, with a clientele spanning four continents.

Memory

Tezuka, photographed in the home she designed for herself and her family.

22

Colorplan represents an exceptional achievement in paper making. Over the last 80 years we have continually refined, perfected, and pushed the range to its limits. Every one of its 55 colours, 25 embossings and 10 weights is made sustainably, in Great Britain.

It can adapt to endless transformations, from boxes to business cards, paper bags to works of art. Colorplan is available all over the world, and consistently beautiful on seven continents.

Get in touch info@gfsmith.com gfsmith.com @gfsmithpapers @colorplan_papers Follow the QR code to request the new Colorplan Swatch.

Preteen Dreams Words Helen Gonzalez Brown Images Bandai-Namco

24

You know the feeling: when you pat your pockets and realise it’s not there. You throw open your bag and rummage through in a haphazard way that speaks to your rising level of panic – but it’s not there either. Your stomach lurches, its absence crashing down upon you.

That’s how I feel when I lose my phone, too, but at the moment I’m searching for my Tamagotchi.

For readers who weren’t pulled into a nostalgic reverie by the mere mention of its name, the Tamagotchi is an egg-shaped digital pet that was one of the biggest toy fads of the late 90s and early 2000s. The device features three small buttons, and soon after turning it on, an egg made from a handful of pixels appears on its tiny black and grey screen, which quickly hatches into an alien character that the user must attempt to raise into adulthood. According to The New York Times, the toy sold out so quickly in the first six months of its release that Japanese shoppers began camping outside stores to secure one, and within three years developer Bandai had sold more than 40m units worldwide.

“Pets are only cute 20 to 30 per cent of the time, and the rest is a lot of trouble, a lot of work,” Tamagotchi inventor Yokoi Akihiro told The New York Times in a 1997 interview explaining why he created a toy that regularly demands its users feed it, play with it, give it medicine and clean up its poo by emitting high-pitched beeps. “But I think that you also start to love them when you take care of them.”

Yokoi understood that the flip-side of love is loss: left unattended for even half a day, the Tamagotchi would die from neglect. To avoid this macabre fate, children began taking it with them everywhere; The New York Times even reported that some children dropped their pencils during a timed standardised test in order to check on their toys. The Tamagotchi’s grip upon users was new and startling: researchers coined the term “the Tamagotchi effect” to describe the phenomenon of humans starting to develop emotional attachments to machines.

Many critics consider Tamagotchis to be a precursor to our contemporary relationships with smartphones.

Academic Laura Lawton even argues that the Tamagotchi influenced the developing mobile technology market and “prepared people for the constant presence of technology that we are so familiar with today”.

The Nokia Communicator, a mobile phone that

opened like a clamshell and had SMS capabilities as well as (painfully slow) internet access, was released in 1996, the same year as the Tamagotchi. Only a few months later, a downloadable Tamagotchi ringtone was available for purchase, and Lawton notes that advertisements increasingly began to anthropomorphise mobile phones, giving them arms, legs and faces. Bandai even released the Tamapitchi device in Japan the following year, which combined a standard phone’s functions with raising a Tamagotchi, and then released the Tamagotchi Connection worldwide in 2004, which used infrared technology to allow users to connect with nearby devices.

Tamagotchis were soon eclipsed by Furbies: fuzzy robots programmed to speak their own language, which became the next toy fad. While Bandai (which merged with video game and entertainment company Namco in the mid-2000s to become Bandai-Namco) frequently continued to release new models of the Tamagotchi in Japan – including a Christmas-themed iteration where users look after Santa Claus, and a model where they can parent the devil – the company released far fewer abroad. But this all changed in 2019, when Bandai-Namco re-released the original Tamagotchi globally and launched the Tamagotchi On, the first international version with a colour screen. Over the last five years, it has continued to launch new generation models with ever more complex features, such as a camera and motion sensors, while also kicking up nostalgia by re-releasing the Connection this year, on its 20th anniversary.

The model that Bandai-Namco has loaned me for this essay is a re-release of its first ever digital pet. When I finally find the device at the bottom of my backpack, it greets me by bouncing up and down. I’ve turned the sound off, so it opens and closes its mouth inaudibly, like a cat meowing from behind a window. When I spy a steaming pile of poo, I surprise myself by stroking the device with my thumb and making a cooing sound before I clear it up. Although I would never act so tenderly with my iPhone as I do my Tamagotchi, my phone has been in my hand all night – I wouldn’t even think to let it go.

The Tamagotchi has been welcomed back into the zeitgeist in recent years, for which there’s a couple of obvious reasons: many people rediscovered and took comfort in old hobbies during pandemic lockdowns, and Y2K style is back in fashion, making its aesthetics bang on trend. Nowadays, Tamagotchis are even sold at Urban Outfitters, as well as in more traditional toy

Memory

retailers. “I think nostalgia is just generally really popular at the moment,” Tamagotchi brand manager Priya Jadeja tells me, adding that sales skyrocketed even before the pandemic. “It’s also a play pattern that is quite unique and original.” The resurgence makes sense: many of the millennials who were part of the first wave of Tamagotchi fans now have kids of their own who they are keen to share the toy with.

After anxiously checking on my Tamagotchi at a work event, filled with concern that it had passed away during an hour-long panel talk, I strike up a conversation with someone who happens to relate. Alice Dousova owned a Tamagotchi as a child and recently bought one for her six-year-old daughter, Mélodie. “I always thought it was an incredibly sophisticated toy,” she laughs, comparing it to other games she played at the time, such as Tetris. “Now I see how incredibly simple the graphics are, but it’s still really fun.” Both Alice and her partner enlisted their parents to help care for their Tamagotchis back in the day, and now provide community care for Mélodie’s, with Alice hooking the Tamagotchi’s keychain through the belt loops of her jeans. “I quite enjoy it, it’s a conversation starter when it beeps at work,” she says.

I don’t have a child and I wasn’t allowed to own a Tamagotchi when I was younger, but luckily I now get to live out my preteen dreams. My Tamagotchi is very cute: its shell is pink and white with berries on it, and I show it off excitedly to many people in my life, most of whom don’t care. But once the novelty wears off, it feels much more like a chore than a toy. My resentment increases as my character grows up: midway through day three, it evolves into Kuchipatchi, a large blob with duck-like lips that it continuously smacks together in a way that feels ungrateful. Two days later, it grows legs and pops its hips from side to side in a mocking dance routine. When I ask Alice if she shares my feelings of resentment, she responds graciously: “As a mum, you have so many extra chores that it doesn’t really feel like a big deal.”

When the Tamagotchi was first released, it was primarily marketed to girls, and in her book Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, cultural anthropologist Anne Allison writes that the Japanese edition of the device’s guidebook was even designed to look like the health records women used to chart the growth of their babies. A year later, Bandai released Digimon, Tamagotchi’s masculine counterpart,

which allowed characters to fight as well as play. While children of all genders clamoured for a Tamagotchi, defying its gendered marketing, back in the 1990s the responsibility of helping children to care for their devices still largely fell on mothers. “One of my friend’s mums ran a Tamagotchi daycare,” Jadeja remembers. Though I’m sure that many mothers still do the lion’s share of Tamagotchi care, I am pleased to hear that Alice’s partner, having grown up caring for one himself, is also invested in Mélodie’s digital pet.

I can track my own caregiving skills via three on-screen meters that show whether my Tamagotchi has received enough food, play time and discipline. Nevertheless, I can’t bring myself to press the discipline icon, which resembles Pac-Man shouting, particularly often. I’ll admit that sometimes its refusal to eat the sweets I offer inspires a spontaneous fury within me and I enjoy pressing it maliciously, but most of the time this feature just confuses me. Whenever I do use discipline, my Tamagotchi fumes back at me, emanating small black clouds of frustration that make it look like it’s farting in revenge. It never backs down, so I just feel like I’m stoking greater animosity between us. “I want it to die but I don’t want to kill it,” I whine to my partner at the end of week one, as I clean away poo while nursing a hangover.

“You’re going to be such a good mum one day,” he laughs.

The Tamagotchi is parenting me as much as I am parenting it, and this becomes extremely apparent once I try out a different model.

The latest of the new generation models, the Tamagotchi Uni (2023), is wifi-enabled so that its games can regularly refresh, and has a colour screen and a pink wristband so you can wear it like a smartwatch.

In comparison to the Original, the Uni feels like a cosy paradise: my character has its own home, and I can take it for walks in the park or swing by the arcade.

Its kitchen has mint green checkerboard floors and the bedroom has a circular window that frames the changing sky. I can rack up points by playing games or completing care tasks, which I can then use to personalise my space by visiting the Tama mall. It only sells essentials, such as bagpipes, a framed portrait of a pumpkin, and a Marie Antoinette-style sofa.

The Tamagotchi brand does an impressive job of bridging nostalgic play with new technologies. “It still keeps some play values alive that are found in other 26

Memory

28

things, like when kids have dolls that they nurture,” Jadeja says. But the caretaking features in the Uni are much more complex: even if two users get the same character, its traits will be influenced by the care they give it, creating the impression of more developed personalities. My character, for example, is a solemn ninja called Gozaruchi, whose defining trait is shyness because I rarely remember to take him outside. The Uni also has motion sensors so users can steer the screen from side to side while playing games, which Jadeja points out is similar to old-fashioned pinball mazes.

While it retains the same high-pitched digital beeps as the Original and the animation is still pixel art, there are additional sounds and much more detailed graphics: you can see the characters blush or look surprised, for example.

Despite some of these key similarities, it feels like the Uni motivates me to care for it by dangling a carrot, while the Original uses the threat of a stick. This feeling is underscored by the fact that the Uni doesn’t even feature a discipline button – in this model, it only matters that my Tamagotchi is kept happy and full. Due to its superior animation and world-building, the Uni feels like both a pet and a place: a pastel-coloured universe where I can hang out away from whatever dull task I’m doing in real life, offering a reprieve that feels similar to going on social media.

Accustomed as I am to algorithms seducing me into a never-ending scroll, I realise that I was unused to the Original’s barefaced manipulation, and how little it seemed to offer me in return. Gozaruchi even models this addictive behaviour back to me: at around 7pm each day, he automatically starts playing on a tablet like a bored child at the airport.

The spatial aspect of new technologies is highlighted even further by the Tamaverse feature. Inspired by ideas of the metaverse, Gozaruchi can put on a virtual reality headset and quickly arrive in a parlour where he is greeted in various languages by the characters of other Tamagotchi users. “We tried to make a device with lots of new features to explore and connect in ways that are relevant for the times we’re living in,” Jadeja says. Each character represents a real person who is tuning into the Tamaverse at the same time as me; but in order to ensure younger users can play safely without needing parental supervision, we can’t do anything more than automatically greet each other in our native tongues. “We wanted to make sure it is accessible for older fans, but still totally safe given

that you potentially have six year olds playing as well,” Jadeja says. My favourite part of the Tamaverse is taking Gozaruchi on dates: after selecting a match from a Tinder-style deck of characters, my ninja gets to sit with them briefly in a jazzy art deco-style bar or a peach-toned café.

But Alice tells me that she enjoys how austere the Original is. “When kids watch too many cartoons, they become a bit numb, and just want more and more,” she says. “But Mélodie doesn’t get like that with the Tamagotchi, it’s different.

You feed it and play with it, see that it’s OK, then put it down.” The Tamagotchi revival has also coincided with the rise of using retro mobile phones, or “dumbphones”, as a way to fight social media addiction. The first ever mobile phone I owned, the Nokia 3310, was re-released in 2017; I still have vivid memories of its buttons rubbing under my thumbs like jelly sweets. It strikes me that I have very few sensory impressions of my iPhone; its smooth touchscreen offers me a seamless window into another world.

Everything in the Uni gives the impression of sentience: all the furniture has Tamagotchi-style faces with little eyes and beaks, including the bath and the toilet, and outside in the garden there’s a green hedge with a face who likes to flirtatiously nuzzle Gozaruchi and shimmer with hearts. The emotional attachment that Tamagotchis engender in humans comes from this same phenomenon – attributing a life-force or essence to inanimate objects, otherwise known as animism.

In Millennial Monsters, Allison suggests that the animism of Japanese traditions, such as the indigenous religion Shintoism, shaped the design of Tamagotchis, and in an article about human relationships with technology for Emergence Magazine, ecologist and philosopher David Abrams points out that animist beliefs are actually common to most indigenous cultures. “The instinctive experience of reciprocity or exchange between the perceiver and the perceived lies at the heart of all human perception,” he writes, arguing that we have an innate tendency to view our surroundings as full of life. Coupled with a new and unfamiliar technology, this inclination meant that some children in the 90s struggled with the mortality of Tamagotchis; in 1998, CNN reported that a pet cemetery in Cornwall had fenced off a section for electronic pets, where owner Terry Squires carried out burials for Tamagotchi lovers from Switzerland,

Memory

Germany, France, Canada and the United States. The feature was accompanied by photos of solemn children with mullets holding tiny coffins.

“When [the Tamagotchi] first died, we hadn’t told Mélodie that it was going to come back, and she was really upset, really, really distraught,” Alice says. The Original’s death screen is pretty distressing: a black skull hovers over the character while the device emits beeps that sound like a life-support machine slowing down. No matter how many buttons you press, there’s nothing you can do, and eventually it turns into an angel and floats off the screen. But the poignancy of this saga is dulled once the Tamagotchi is reset and a new egg instantly appears on the screen; once Mélodie realised the cycle of care could start all over again, she was no longer affected.

After helping to raise around eight characters with Mélodie, none of which have lasted beyond ten days, Alice’s heart has grown weary. “I’m a bit more reluctant to kind of love it, or make an attachment, because I just think, well, it’s probably going to pass away anyway,” she says. Alice believes that if it was easier to keep the device alive for longer, then even greater attachments could be formed. But as Allison points out in Millennial Monsters, “making the toy labour-intensive from the minute it hatches was part of Yokoi’s design, intended to make players attach immediately to their ‘pets’”, a feature which privileges forming an instant attachment over sustaining a long-lasting one.

When I ask Alice if the Tamagotchi is Mélodie’s favourite toy, she immediately says no. “She goes to bed with a couple of soft toys and I think these are like, her top toys,” she says. Soft toys also invoke a sense of animism: a 2007 study by psychologists at the University of Bristol and Yale University concluded that children become attached to soft toys or blankets they sleep with because they believe they have “a unique property or ‘essence’”. Unlike Tamagotchis, this essence can’t be replicated: when offered copies of their beloved toys in the study, the vast majority of children distinguished their original objects from doppelgängers and stayed faithful to them. And although they can be mangled or lost, soft toys don’t threaten expiration – in fact,

researchers at VU University Amsterdam even found in a 2013 study that cuddling a soft toy can help alleviate people’s anxieties around death.

I would never look at a new soft toy with pristine fur and think it had an essence, but when I remember the black horse with a diamond on its forehead that was large enough for me to spoon as a child, and my brother’s well-loved sock-puppet named Johnny, it’s hard not to feel like they soaked up a part of us, subtly animated by the daily embrace of our sleepy arms.

An article from design trends magazine Hype&Hyper suggests that designing animistic products could be a potential tool for avoiding overconsumption by making people feel more attached to their possessions, and this is certainly true for soft toys, which retain their charm long after their beauty fades. But when it comes to technology, this theory doesn’t seem to hold water.

“We become attached to our electronic devices not for their own sake, but for what the technology they contain enables,” Hype&Hyper writes. “Our cherished phones will soon be replaced by a newer and smarter model, and the old one can go in the trash.” Tamagotchis show that care can only be briefly manufactured through programming, while soft toys demonstrate the staying power of love that is given freely.

As befits the Uni’s softer approach to parenting, my ninja doesn’t have to die. At the end of every date in the Tamaverse I am given the option to let Gozaruchi propose and, once married,1 he will disappear. After a few days I tire of caring for him, and when I see his health starting to deteriorate, I finally allow him to marry a pudgy, starry-eyed character wearing a panda hat. “I will protect you with everything I have!” he proclaims, and she responds with fluttering hearts.

Fireworks explode, and they ride off into the sunset in a white car with a duck beak while other characters throw confetti. Almost instantaneously, an egg rolls on to my screen, which my good-for-nothing son has left me to raise. E N D Helen Gonzalez Brown is Disegno’s assistant editor.

1 Tamagotchi models that allow characters to get married do not permit same-sex bonds, even though the characters themselves often appear quite gender-neutral. Fans, however, have rebelled against this heteronormative programming, with multiple TikTok videos and a guide on Inverse about how to raise a queer Tamagotchi.

30

A Place We Wish to Be Words Fowota Mortoo Photographs Alfred Quartey

The new ANO space in the Aburi Mountains, Ghana.

Memory

“You have to provide a vision, and this is where I say your duty lies. But the point is, which kind of vision?”

learn the different species’ names, much less the possibilities of engaging with the beings around them.

In this way, where I am is not unlike many other places – a landscape that has been transformed by colonial inheritances. As everywhere, it is navigating imbalances imposed by the illusion that it is possible to grow infinitely with finite material. And here, too, bodies of knowledge that have for so long sustained a balance have been overwritten with those that employ violence against land and life to acquire wealth by any means. Each day we see the story unraveling as lives and livelihoods are disordered by disrupted ecologies and racialised hierarchies of human and non-human life.

This all appears so entrenched as to be immovable – as though it has always been. But it hasn’t, and it is worth remembering that Gilmore’s question asks of where we wish to be. Centred around a transformation of how we sustain ourselves, the land that I imagine is somewhere that life’s flows are rewoven. It is a place whose stewards conceive of creativity and collective memory as being necessary to imagining a world that is different to this one. Those who come there to learn and teach reconsider what we have inherited, how we construct buildings, grow food, dye clothes and understand waste. There are jars of heirloom seeds and they serve as a library of sorts, borrowing and gifting the practice of patronage. Nonuniform rows of plants and colossal drooping banana trees compel us towards a literacy of land that extends beyond the page. The place is one where people come to learn of possibility, and where presence is healing.

This is reminiscent of Konkonuru itself, which has long been a town of healers. Founded two centuries ago, it was originally the base of the standing army of Aburi, and residents became skilled in addressing injuries and ailments resulting from war. This ecological knowledge and distinction remained even after war left. So the place I imagine is one that, in some way, returns to itself.

I find myself there with one other person of a most carefully attentive spirit, Taeya Boi-Doku. Her presence brings light and the most brilliant questions. With our hands in the soil alongside one another, we share laughter and labour, delighting in the sweetness of shared purpose.1 Our task of transforming the land into an educational space is something we are doing as fellows with the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, or ANO, an organisation founded in 2002 by writer and art historian Nana Oforiatta-Ayim.

There are some questions that I carry with me always.

The one above is drawn from poet Kofi Awoonor, speaking about the role of artists at a 1967 conference of African writers. Another comes from geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In ‘Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence’, she asks: how do we make the places we are into the places we wish to be?

The land we come to is in the midst of Konkonuru, a town within Ghana’s Aburi Mountains. It is the rainy season and fog touches everything almost always, but especially in the wake of downpours. On days when it clears, I see the entirety of a steep half acre dotted with patches of oil palm, pawpaw and plantain trees. The land is rocky and, walking down the slope, we make a path navigating the large stones, grasses that reach our knees, and dozens of plants whose names I don’t yet know.

Despite the height of the forest on the drive to the land, the treescape is relatively young. Timber extraction and fires resulting from drought in the early 1980s have transformed the ecologies of Ghana’s Eastern Region, disappearing much of the original forest around the Konkonuru area. Alongside the extraction of palm oil and cocoa, large areas of forest in Ghana were subsumed into the British government’s project of acquiring “empire timber”, or woods from various British colonies.

As architect Iain Jackson details in his work with the Transnational Architecture Group, the British-owned African Timber and Plywood Company played a central role in extracting African mahoganies, walnuts and teaks that were used to construct the interior decoration, floorings and furniture of British homes, universities, post offices and libraries from the 1950s and 60s onward.

In a conservation report dating to 2002, curator William Ofosuhene-Djan describes a silk cotton tree pictured in black and white as “the sole survivor of the original forest that once covered the Aburi hills”. He writes of an abnormally thinned treescape where one can easily count trees from a distance, the scarcity of bitter kola, odum and atee-nini, combined with the total disappearance of others, even as the forest was beginning to reclaim itself. On a visit to Aburi Botanical Gardens, my guide extends this loss of trees described

by Ofosuhene-Djan some 20 years ago to an associated loss of knowledge, expressing how children no longer 32

ANO’s work centres on creating new institutional forms that diverge from the existing model of Western cultural institutions on the African continent. As the organisation shifts away from an exclusively arts-centred model, there is room for work that recognises how the arts and knowledge systems are interwoven with broader philosophies of ecology and education. Alongside an educational organic farm, the new space will include a school, as well as accommodation for culinary and artist residencies. In Ayim’s words, the shift has been prompted by decades of research relating to indigenous knowledge systems where “art and culture are linked to cosmologies, education, knowledge of nature and the earth”. These structures are being designed and built in collaboration with Hive Earth, a studio based in Accra, Ghana, which specialises in rammed earth construction. The organisation is also in conversation with Worofila, an architectural practice based in Dakar, Senegal, which employs bio-climatic construction and foregrounds the use of local materials. Building on ANO’s decade-long work to produce the digital Pan-African Cultural Encyclopedia, which will launch in September 2024 and documents aspects of indigenous knowledge systems across the continent, our task is to design a physical space that translates these bodies of collective memory into spatial form.

In trying to create a place that reanimates this memory, we navigate the facts of erasure – of knowledge, lifeways and names – that make it more difficult to imagine, let alone materialise, a world different to this one. And still, as archivist Judith Opoku-Boateng told me once: “Deɛ ɛmoa no adi no, wɔnni nkɔ, deɛ aka no, yɛbɛbɔ ho ban” – “The birds may have taken their share, but we will protect that which is left”. We intend to do this, though not with humid storerooms or pillaged “collections”, but by recalling that the way to keep archives alive is by living them. And so we begin with misshapen blocks of nyame dua, odum, bamboo and palm, with the ever-present materiality of memory, 1 In his book The Healers, Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah writes: “The others available were many, of course. The impression they gave of something stable, undisturbed, came from their accepting the existing world as satisfactory. But what deep-eating blindness could make any soul see its satisfaction in such warped realities?

The only problems the others saw were two: to find a personal place in the given world; and having found that space, to keep it. But his need was for relationships with people for whom the existing world was not perfect, not even reasonably satisfactory.

These would be people whose place in the world was something yet to be created because their real world was not yet entirely present. People to work with.”

and with shears in our hands that can be made useful towards this envisioning guided by our inheritances.

Our sketches for this place take form in bound notebooks that migrate to Google Drawings, in sandy soil soon covered with footprints, in the margins of pages, in the exchange of breath and ideas aloud. They depict a mosaic garden whose pieces align with the contours of the land, a small enclave of plants that can give natural dyes for artists in residence, and a long communal table that will host meals centring indigenous dishes. As we work, we encounter those who I have come to think of as the healers, despite having no such formal designation. Their knowledge is invaluable to how we shape the land, and is reminiscent of novelist Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1979 novel The Healers.

The book is one of the things I bring with me to the land, and I return to it in the evenings, spellbound.

Armah speaks of the healers as those whose work is the “ending of all unnatural rifts”. They must see beyond the present and tomorrow, working for “results so firm they may not be wholly visible till centuries have flowed into millennia”.

The first we encounter while we search for seeds.

Early in gathering material for the land, we travel a few hours north to Bolgatanga for an indigenous seeds fair. The event is organised by Beela and Trax Ghana, two organisations based in the Upper East Region working to maintain farmer-managed seed systems. It takes place in the town’s Jubilee Park where dozens of farmers from the country’s Upper East and North East Regions have gathered for a seed exchange. Those in attendance are seated by region under three large white tents facing a raised platform that plays host to speeches about the importance of retaining an autonomous and sovereign food system, of which the foundation is seed.

It brings together seeds that many in attendance have not seen in decades, all of which are indigenous varieties. These seeds can enable the traditionally cyclical and autonomous practices of seed-saving; they differ from hybrid seeds that are bred in order to produce higher yields, but which cannot be resown to bear fruit, undermining farmer autonomy and community-managed seed systems as growers are forced to buy new ones each season. Preserving and sharing them through gatherings like this retains seed variety, which is crucial in sustaining foods that have been passed down through generations, and securing adaptability and farmer autonomy despite yearly shifts in growing conditions.

Memory

Planting underway at ANO.

The meditation path.

Fowota Mortoo (left) and Taeya Boi-Doku (right).

34

Mapping the location of different plants.

A residence in the ANO space.

The space will eventually house a school, an organic farm and artist residencies.

Memory

simply: “I’m still practising art. But the alive one[…]

I used to paint plants. Now I create them.”

We leave there with a dozen knee-high tree seedlings of various mango, lemon and guava varieties that later form the edges of a meditation path on the flattened area of land towards the bottom wall. Though we can see the entirety of the spiral now, trees will eventually form a shaded canopy over the walkway with fruits that come in and out of season. Arranging the kneehigh seedlings in a spiral and lining the in-between spaces with stakes of bamboo, we make a path that is wide enough for two that ends in a small circular clearing. The spiral recalls the Adinkra symbol owia kokroko, or “the greatness of the sun”. At the entrance we place miracle leaf, which is often found at the gateway of homes, meant to deter those with bad intentions. It is one of many plants whose placement signals significance, such as the aviãti, or boundary tree, and bendua, which are often planted in order to demarcate land boundaries.

These designs form the basis of what will be an educational space, abundant with children’s yells of delight and wonder. It will abound with cycles – of water reused, food scraps returning to soil, of building materials that work with the earth.

The place we are making has traces of what, in some ways, I have seen before. There is the Experimental Farm of Pessubé and the pilot schools that were built in the liberated regions of Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s to 1970s,2 the Freedom Farm Cooperative founded by Fannie Lou Hamer in 1967 in Mississippi,3 the Somankidi Coura collective in Mali formed in the late 1970s,4 and more. Centred around creating new possibilities for the spaces they inhabited, each of these sites began with reimagining food and education systems. Recognising the interconnected nature of land, politics, economy and culture, their stewards crafted spaces of refuge and sanctuary amid oppressive structures through their commitment to sustaining collective memory. Spaces like these are continuing to blossom in Ghana and across the African continent, each of which reimagines the notion of the archive by centring reciprocal relationships to land and education. In the midst of intensifying environmental crises, they model a different positioning of ourselves within a web of ecologies, doing work to repair and sustain life.

There is a difficulty in giving a singular name in English to these spaces, as their work is precisely in opposition to the fragmentation of our lives into discrete

One of the speakers, Edwin Baffour of advocacy organisation Food Sovereignty Ghana, references replacing millet with corn in making the dish tuo zaafi, especially across southern Ghana. It is a shift, he notes, that could one day lead to a loss of memory that things had ever been otherwise. He emphasises millet as a drought-resistant indigenous grain that is less acidic, higher in fibre and more nutrient-dense than corn.

Though the global food system has been shaped to be dominated by select varieties of every fruit, vegetable and grain, this work of preserving diversity of seed is critical, as each seed has characteristics that make them best suited to grow in different circumstances, whether related to water, heat or soil.

The significance of this distinction in seed type is reinforced a few days later during a visit to see Solomon Amuzu, the founder of Call to Nature, the first heirloom seed company in Ghana. Through Amuzu we source a number of seeds to add to those that we’ve gathered in the north: akokomesa basil, Techiman tomato, bokoboko spinach, apatram and ase beans, and nkruma tenten, a variety of okra. Neighbouring Asenema Waterfalls, Amuzu’s farm is bordered by massive bamboo, prekese and oil palm trees and, as he points to each of the areas of land planted to give seed, he tells their story. The evivi ntor basil was gifted from a woman he met in the Volta Region, and the seeds from one of her plants have brought forth thousands.

The Nsoso cherry tomatoes he encountered on a walk through the forest.

Back on the land in Konkonuru, we work slowly in crafting the rows, and shovelling and shifting rocks in order to preserve the existing plants, many of whom we learn are medicinal despite so often being characterised as weeds. Edem Assigbui, the caretaker of the land, is beside us as he is on most days. Whether sourcing pieces of wood or harvesting bamboo from a forest a short walk from the busiest part of Konkonuru, he guides, always affirming the possibility of doing whatever we’d hoped.

On one of these days, we make a short trip north to Kpong to meet Mush Kuma, the founder of Kay Seedlings and an artist. Having studied painting and sculpture, he draws out the texture, colour and shape of the miracle berry bush, the water-loving gotu kola, and the bottle palm trees that surround us in an intensely soft-spoken way, as well as the craft and creativity needed to graft trees successfully. He describes the shift in his practice 36

Indigenous seed varieties.

Seedlings prepared for ANO.

areas (of school, or work, or play), or our knowledge into disciplines of study. Despite this difficulty, there are, as always, names in other languages. Among them – milpa, mahereko and maroon.5

across from each other, every plant I ask him about, he knows. Following writer Imani Perry’s articulation in her book Vexy Thing (2018) of maps as sites that draw our attention to one set of things rather than another, I am considering what to make visible, and to whom, in these maps that will help orient visitors to the ANO space.

One map will foreground the plant ecologies of the land – their locations relative to each other, their names, significance, and ways to engage with them, weaving in the different uses of plant fibres from the land. The other map will be more reflective of process and with a greater eye to temporality, incorporating old images of the Konkonuru Community Farm Project from a few decades ago, archival maps of Konkonuru, and the silk cotton trees that once covered the Aburi hills. Both are slowly coming into being, shaped by the collective memories that have created this place that we, and many others, have imagined. E N D

As the end of my stay on the land comes closer, I am engaged in the work of mapping the land. This process has found me often in the company of Richard Amoani, a curator at the Botanical Gardens, and immersed in a new literacy and language. Seated at a large table 2 Sónia Vaz Borges and Filipa César’s work explores Amilcar Cabral’s state farm Granja de Pessubé and the pilot schools established by the PAIGC political party in the liberated regions of Guinea-Bissau during the liberation struggle against Portugal. Carlos Schwarz expands on this in his text ‘Amilcar Cabral, An Agronomist Before His Time’.

3 Monica White writes about the Freedom Farm Cooperative founded

by Fannie Lou Hamer in Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (2018).

4 Somankidi Coura was a farming collective established in Mali in the wake of severe droughts that prompted a shift towards autonomous economic and farming practices. The cooperative became a regional model and is described in a research collaboration between co-founder Bouba Touré and filmmaker Raphaël Grisey in ‘What Malian Farming Collective Somankidi Coura Tells Us About the Value of Art’, published in Art Review.

5 In ‘Milpa Ecologies: Transgenerational Foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico’, published in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, Keitlyn Alcántara describes the ancient milpa growing system of “terraced networks of both agricultural and wild plants”. Chérie Rivers Ndaliko’s forthcoming monograph Mahereko: A Womanist Lexicon of Radical Black Ecology makes reference to the Kinande word. Writer and organiser Beatriz Nascimento’s work, meanwhile, centres on understanding maroon communities, or quilombos in Brazil, as “autonomous Black spaces of liberation” and as a persisting political practice. Her 1989 film, Orí, directed by Raquel Gerber and narrated by Nascimento, explores much of her intellectual and creative body of work on the Brazilian Black Atlantic and the Black Consciousness Movement of the 1970s and 80s.

Fowota Mortoo is a geographer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Alfred Quartey is a lifestyle photographer living in Accra, Ghana.

Memory

At Sea Words Ellen Peirson Photographs Jim Stephenson

Places exist in the stories we tell about them. The British seaside is thought, remembered, longed into being, so that a still image of itself emerges, complete and precise. Britain’s intense affection for its “bucket and spade” seaside resorts is in their tawdry, shabby glamour: the Victorian guesthouses, golden beaches and glittering amusement arcades of endless summer holidays. But life on the coast is one of extremes, between low and high tide, feast and famine, the swells of summer and the frost of winter. Still we cling to these shores with an unwavering affection that only those with memories of chasing the tide across the foreshore can. It’s difficult to forget the way that the sand clings to the gaps in your toes, dusted off but never completely gone, like the holiday memories that we continuously make and remake.

But the seaside also simultaneously obsesses over the new: resorts are victims to the whims of holidaymakers’ changing fashions and tastes, under continual economic pressure to reinvent themselves, regenerate, rejuvenate, revitalise, in order to keep visitors coming. Each reimagining is looking to a hopeful future on the horizon, one that quickly becomes a part of its past – the memories and nostalgia that shape the very real image of the seaside in our cultural memory.

The seaside belongs to us all: it has a unique place in the British cultural imaginary as somewhere for escapism and pure enjoyment, but also speaks to deeply personal memories, such as my own of growing up on the Kent coast. In such seaside towns, discourse about the fringes of the country having been left behind is strong, with the coastland seen as the reserve of those with nowhere else to go, the last resort. It is a story that I have written into various pieces, picking apart each reason for the seaside’s demise, and contemplating its future. But childhoods played out against this faded grandeur ignore any

thesis of structural decline. This is an intuitive affection for the seaside, one that has been raised in us.

What is it to piece together these memories?

To wade through the documented and the imagined, and find in it a messy, complex place of more than the memories it can hold. To commit it to memory, if we can remember it correctly.

This story begins at Jay Wick Farm, Essex, in 1928, and it is still being written today, in the village of Jaywick Sands.

January 1928 Frank ‘Foff’ Stedman drives through the flat, endless Essex countryside, 90 minutes outside of London where the marshland slices into the North Sea. His headlights snake across the winding cart tracks until a handful of tumbledown farmhouses interrupt the flatlands, where a herd of dairy cows graze in the January frost. Jay Wick Farm is unassuming, uninspiring, inconspicuous, but he rolls down towards the shore and notices the waves, how they lap at the sand, how each one erases the memory of the previous, how the edge of such a solid immovable country is constantly changing. He sees the ocean, how it dances with the sky, and looks to the horizon, with designs on an affordable holiday resort for working-class Londoners. The bitter winter of January confirms that even in the harshest conditions, these sea-facing plains could captivate a holidaymaker.

Nine months later, Stedman will buy all 320 acres. The future will come to life with grids of plots, £50 each, with each buyer building their own shack, bungalow or hut. Whenever August rolls around, the workers of the East End will migrate here, following the dashed lines of the A-roads out until they can’t go any farther, making the coast their home for the summer.

38

Sunspot, designed by HAT Projects in Jaywick Sands.

Memory

Historic 20th-century views of Jaywick Sands (images: courtesy of Jaywick Local History Society).

40

January 1953 The North Sea brims over from the Netherlands to the UK as an unprecedented tidal surge batters both coastlines. Water breaks through Jaywick’s 1880 sea wall at Colne Point and sweeps across the marshes overnight on the 31st. Rivers and fields swell and engulf the holiday huts that were never meant to be homes.

Water surges across the marshes, half a mile inland to the Cottage Cafe, where locals flee as waves crash into living rooms, reaching up to the gutters of the low-lying shacks. Some cling to dining tables, floating like islands, others crouch on loft space joists, crawl onto roofs, scrambling for dry land. Thirty-five people die and the waters are never calm again.

The gold and sandy beaches make life unpredictable in Jaywick. Much of the town is below sea level, and though local and national government have spent millions on flood defences over the decades, rising sea levels quickly catch up. It is one of few remaining examples of plotlands developments in the country: areas of unprofitable agricultural land that were divided into small pieces of land in the 20s and 30s, before being sold off cheaply for self-build houses and holiday chalets. They feel uniquely British, tied to the aspiration to own one’s own land, however small and wherever tolerated. Despite this, plotlands have been largely ignored by local authorities, existing outside planning systems, with roads unadopted by the council, and without heating, running water and proper drainage.

Often maligned by those in power, most were demolished by local authorities in the postwar period, but Jaywick, having managed to survive the floods of 1953, resisted.

The temporary accommodation became permanent after the second world war, when East Enders escaped the bombed-out city and made Jaywick their home.

Now it has some 4,800 permanent residents.

Jaywick became popular with mechanics from the Ford factory in Dagenham, who built their chalets with the company’s packing crates. Brooklands, one of the two original estates, has streets named after car manufacturers – Bentley, Morris, Austin, Humber – each lined up next to the other in the shape of a car radiator grille. The other, Grasslands, uses the names of wildflowers that were there long before the cars arrived – rosemary, cornflower and willow. Stedman imagined the wild climes that could be brought closer to the worker thanks to car ownership. Today, however, the roads, mostly ignored by the local council, are not

publicly maintained and therefore suffer from potholes and shoddy repairs. The permanent threat of floods means that, even in the swells of summer, residents’ palms are always turned up to the sky, hoping the rain won’t come.

The result is a place unlike anywhere else in the UK. In their 1984 book Arcadia for All, architect and anarchist writer Colin Ward and academic Dennis Hardy describe how plotlands developments enthralled architectural theorists, representing “not the horrors of uncontrolled development, but the charm of an indigenous vernacular of makeshift design”. Jaywick was an escape from the polluted city, where the workers from London’s grimy East End could feel the freedom and health of the eastern sea air. Now, Jaywick knows isolation much more intimately.

All of the factors that have led to widespread deprivation at the British seaside elsewhere, Jaywick has in multiples. It is poorly connected to nearby Clacton, which itself sits at the end of a slow train line. Property is cheap in the town, but its fragile socioeconomic and geographic position means it has received little-to-no investment. Private landlords, however, rent out the smallest and most rundown houses to people on housing benefit, bringing new residents to the town but promising limited employment opportunities in return. Tourism has dwindled and there are few other industries. Those who can typically leave the area to find employment, leaving behind a rapidly ageing population. Portrayals in the national media have highlighted narratives of precarity, exclusion and dependence, and, as such, there is little trust left between Jaywick residents and outsiders who say they might help.

The British government’s multiple deprivation indices have consistently ranked one of the Jaywick wards as the poorest in the country – in 2010, and again in 2015 and 2019 – and resultantly Jaywick has become a shorthand for the Broken Britain narrative.

Those who have fallen on hard times, in a part of the country systematically and consciously left behind by successive national and local governments, are not met with compassion, but with Daily Mail headlines bemoaning so-called seaside scroungers. A Channel 5 documentary, Benefits by the Sea, painted the residents as the problem, and an image of one of the Brooklands’ streets was used in a 2018 US midterm election political advert to warn American voters of what their country could look like if they did not vote for Donald Trump.

Memory

The new Sunspot houses a number of affordable business units.

42

Memory

An area of the country that is knowingly forgotten about is only remembered as an excuse to gawk at poverty.

The stories we tell about an area matter, because they shape and disturb the imagination of a place until they become part of its fabric. Jaywick today stands as a febrile mix of hope and desperation.

The community – as befitting the DIY spirit on which it was built – is proudly resilient. In 1970, residents won a high court order, preventing the entire place from being demolished, and they continue to resist insensitive redevelopment by private developers and to lobby for better infrastructure. Jaywick has survived constant flooding threats, a hostile 1978 directive requiring full planning permission for even minor alterations and improvements, and compulsory purchase orders that have obliterated most other plotlands developments in the country. But these existential threats have not deterred Jaywick from fighting for its future.

September 2023 A new café is serving old desserts. Tray-bake vanilla sponge with a stratum of sturdy white icing, a coating of sprinkles with just the right ratio of white to rainbow, and thick, yellow, molten custard drizzled over the slab so that the icing dances with the buttery goo, a rainbow of ink bleeding into sponge and sugar and syrup, served with tea, strong enough to stand a spoon in. Sunspot is the old and the new Jaywick. The name is borrowed from a later incarnation of Bromige’s Playdium, and it exists in a long lineage of Jaywick histories, so many swept away and replaced with headlines: Jaywick doesn’t work, doesn’t want to work, never has. Work and play are one at today’s opening party: kids wail from the teacups as they are spun faster, faster; The Smart Choice proudly opens the doors of its new uniform shop; Seaside Explorers shows Jaywick the crafts possible using found items on the beach; and the barbecue, the candy floss machine and the popcorn maker are never cold.

September 1939 Neville Chamberlain declares war on Germany.

Three days later, 100 mothers and young children are evacuated to Jaywick, and Stedman’s son Jack is placed in charge of assigning the evacuees other people’s holiday chalets. Holidaymakers leave and army personnel arrive, ripping up the miniature railway track to pillage the scrap iron, and making Jaywick a restricted zone due to the invasion risk of its coastal location. On the seafront, Frank Ernest Bromige, the architect of entertainment, has only recently brought his designs to Jaywick. His art deco cinemas are now dotted across the south of England – Dalston’s Rio, Harrow’s Dominion, Hitchin’s Regal – their concrete sculpted around bold graphics and lighting that signal modern leisure and escape. And now, between Brooklands and Grasslands, Bromige’s Playdium amusement arcade and casino rises from Jaywick’s promenade, a low-lying pitch-roofed shed that blends into much of Jaywick’s seafront huts. But its swooshing tower lights up the sky for just a few months before war breaks out: P-L-A-Y-D-I-U-M. Somewhere to get away from it all, the seaside escape – all of the aphorism, the metaphors, the clichés becomes true – this is the last resort, the end of the line. The seas are still.

The new Sunspot business centre is in cheery contrast to Jaywick’s complicated past. Jaywick is isolated and peripheral to the communities it has relied upon for its primary industry of tourism. Regeneration efforts often speak to the need to create spaces for communities to thrive, but Jaywick didn’t need help with this. After decades of being let down and ignored by local and national powers, residents look after each other.

Building something from nothing is in Jaywick’s history. Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope’s 2012 film Jaywick Escapes, for example, explores the dichotomy between those who saw the village as a refuge, retiring to Jaywick with memories of happy holidays there in their youth, and those who arrived in Jaywick with nowhere else to go, variously fleeing from poverty, substance abuse and dysfunction elsewhere. The poignant stories tell of a difficult existence in Jaywick, but one in which the people love where they are.

“In Jaywick, you can’t walk 10 yards without coming across a community centre,” Mick Lister, manager at Sunspot, says. “And we don’t need any more. What it needed was commerce.” Sunspot brings much needed and diverse employment opportunities – cafés and gift shops to draw more visitors to the town, essential shops and services to provide for residents, and offices for arts and creative industries to provide employment and allow people to thrive. “If there’s going to be a driver for the economy in Jaywick, it’s going to be the 44

beach, it’s an amazing place to be, but you couldn’t even buy a coffee or an ice-cream,” explains Hana Loftus of HAT Projects, architect of Sunspot.

The two-storey shed towers above the predominantly one-storey landscape, with an angular multi-pitch roof undulating in reflection of the typical Jaywick chalet.

It is bold and civic – Loftus describes it as “a piece of graphic design as much as a building” – with an interplay of corrugated aluminium and polycarbonate sheets sitting on a bright red steel frame, vivid yellow awnings stretched over deep blue shopfronts, the building saturated with seaside whimsy. It sits on the divide between Brooklands and Grasslands – previously the beating centre of the town, where visitors could find a casino, amusement arcades and a roller-skating rink.

Twenty years ago, Bromige’s Playdium was demolished, and the site was empty, severing the two sides of Jaywick. Sociologist Léo Moulin once wrote that “we eat our most reassuring memories, seasoned with tenderness and ritual, which marked our childhood,” and it is important – or, for some, essential – that a trip to the British seaside offers an opportunity to buy a 99 flake and a scampi and chips on the way home.

Sunspot has been designed through Jaywick’s improvisational spirit. It is considered as a “long meanwhile” use by the council, and its steel and facade connections are designed to be undone and rebuilt elsewhere. It treads a line of being affordable in an area where money is needed across sectors, and being joyful and dignified such that it might raise the aspirations of what is possible. And this it has done – were the council to have put together a traditional business case for Sunspot by assessing demand for commercial space in Jaywick based on local estate agent inquiries, it would not have been built. Instead, they created the demand in reverse. “We asked local businesses directly what their issues were in finding space,” Loftus explains. “Would they consider Jaywick as a location? What would be the deciding factor?

What sort of space would they need? We found enough demand to give comfort to the council that this could be feasible and did a business and financial model around it.”

It may not be a community use building, but Sunspot is playing its part in stitching the community together.

It incorporates essential public toilets to serve the waterfront, and generously gives a pavement back to the promenade so that street life can thrive. Sea defences are essential to such a community, but often

consist of harsh concrete walls that sever the beach from the town, which Jaywick had previously found itself an unwilling victim of. Sunspot cannot break down this solid and essential wall, but by creating new public space on the pavement behind it, it feels like life can spill over on to the beach.

July 2024 The earliest summer days in Jaywick are some of the happiest of the year. New wildflowers are blooming on the promenade and the air is sweet again. The days are long and soft, a lifetime stretching out before school kids combing the beaches, adding shells to their pockets. The new Sunspot business centre enjoys its first days in the sun, as café tables, market stalls and new companies roll out of it. The first gasps of summer announce change, and today, Nigel Farage strikes into Jaywick – his far-right, populist, antiimmigration Reform UK political project in tow – with his head emerging out the top of a khaki Land Rover, ready for battle as it traverses potholes and cracks in streets systematically, historically, incessantly left behind. Farage promises change, reform, and in the early hours of the next day, Jaywick will elect him as its MP. July 1812 Napoleon is waging war across Europe, and a chain of 103 Martello towers have come to jewel the east and south coasts of Britain, from Aldeburgh to Seaford.

At Jaywick, tower D is tall and squat on the low, flat landscape. Walls up to 3m-thick are made of 750,000 London clay bricks, transported downstream from Grays. The circular, tapered walls will resist artillery fire. Their defensive strength is yet to be tested, but they fortify the coast and turn the country inwards.

Seaside towns uneasily occupy the edge of the UK, peripheral to the various economic, social and political structures that govern the country. There are permanent threats at these thresholds and – whether perceived or apparent – they permeate the towns. They hold a history of wartime invasions and victories, with memorials in abundance that serve to both commemorate the dead and to keep fresh the threats of invasion, an anxiety that the far right are quick to exploit. Meanwhile, an unfit housing market is gradually pushing society’s

Memory

46

Public seating beneath a sunshine yellow canopy.

Memory

most vulnerable citizens into its most vulnerable areas.

For decades, we have allowed places such as Jaywick to become the last resort for so many, letting the most precarious end up there, and then looking away as they are unable to cope. Towns such as these have an otherworldliness to them – the still beaches that stretch out for days, and retro seaside memorabilia glittering along their edge – but it can’t be ignored that their failings hold up a mirror to the rest of the country.

Reform, and Farage’s previous political party, UKIP, target these seaside locations. There is a deep-seated British nostalgia that longs for a supposed heyday, a mythical pre-immigration time when things must have been better than they are now. These are the conditions of what cultural and social theorist Paul Gilroy has described as a “postcolonial melancholia”, an attachment to a doctored version of Britain’s colonial past. Seaside constituencies have become a battleground for violent anti-immigration rhetoric because they were left as a relic of their former selves.

Racist rhetoric can be constructed by the powerful, and presented to working-class communities as a way to explain their adversity. Simplistic othering of outsiders is alluring to those in power because it absolves them of past, present and future responsibility, while onedimensional political outlooks also play well at the ballot box.

But the knotty web of histories that has led to Jaywick as it is today does not fit well into a political campaign slogan: somewhere that has its troubles, has been let down, but is still strong in spirit and community.

Farage’s populist politics may appear to give Jaywick a voice, but is more likely obscuring the compound reasons for its steep economic decline, thereby playing into metaphors of being “left behind”, entrenching and ratifying perceptions of a lack of pride in the area and thereby whipping up bigoted, hateful conversation.

Without investment, opportunities and hope, populism can take root, feeding off the idea that the imagined good old days are better than today.

“One of the things about the community in Jaywick is that if they don’t want something to happen, they will lie on the street and stop it,” explains Loftus. “They will absolutely make their feelings really, really clear.” The community eventually welcomed Sunspot, but the scars left behind by previous supposed regeneration schemes run deep.

“Nothing disappears completely[…] In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows,” wrote

French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1974). Historical events are written into a place and live in its memory. Sunspot is now fully let and many businesses are thriving – cake shop Rainy Bakes has already upgraded to a bigger ground-floor unit – but the seas have never been calm in Jaywick. Places must change and evolve, go on without us long after we leave them.

In Travis Elborough’s 2010 wistful account of the English seaside, Wish You Were Here, he writes that “perhaps, in a sense, every trip to the beach as an adult is an attempt to recapture lost innocence or at least to feel as carefree as a child”. But a national obsession with the cheap glamour of these childhood memories, tacky souvenirs, sticky fingers, gaudy colours and seaside kitsch has asked that the more we change, the more these places stay the same.

Our relationship with our coastline is complex, but these messy, nuanced thoughts are not new. Barely a weekend goes by without a national newspaper editorial bemoaning the sentimentality that limits and propels regeneration efforts at the seaside, while simultaneously iconifying their faded charm.

I want to conclude differently, to offer empirical answers, but my own melancholy gets the better of me. I was new to Jaywick when I visited Sunspot, but the landscape was familiar. I habitually floated to buy a packet of chips drenched in vinegar, my hands, sticky from ice-cream, inadvertently combing the beach for shells and sea glass, curiosities I thought I’d long lost interest in. In spite of myself, I still buy into the rosetinted sentimentality that holds the seaside back.

Nostalgia can be dangerous, nationalistic even when expressed politically, but it’s also human nature and it needn’t be paired with complacency. Memories are messy – sticky blobs of associations and incomplete descriptions. The future of Jaywick is in this spirit: creating new narratives that are underpinned and built from all that came before. E N D Ellen Peirson is an architect and writer based in London.

Jim Stephenson is a photographer and filmmaker of people and buildings.

48

Thirsty Words Oli Stratford Photographs Jasmine Deporta

Memory

If you place compressed cellulose sponge into water, it drinks up the liquid. Visually, this is more surprising than it sounds.

has been produced since the 1940s, it has “never really been used in design”: its applications have been largely restricted to cleaning products and medical devices.

“Initially our goal was to mould it in shape,” Blin adds, citing Gaetano Pesce’s 1969 UP 5 lounge chair as their inspiration – a polyurethane design that was shipped vacuum-packed at one-tenth of its size, before popping back into shape when opened. “We dreamt of having something that was moulded into a chair shape and then compressing it,” he adds, although early consultations with Tiffany Abitbol, a materials researcher at Lausanne’s EPFL federal institute of technology, convinced the team that this would not represent “the most easy path”.

Instead, they began to explore three-dimensional forms that could be created using the compressed sponge boards already available on the market – a shift towards a more grounded, less idealised mode of designing sponge forms. “That,” Blin says, “was the real design challenge we had to meet.”

The team, which was supplemented by the addition of external designers Julie Richoz and Chris Kabel, began to experiment with different material constructions that would make use of the foam’s shape-memory properties, preparing the boards so that their expansion could be controlled and directed – what Blin terms “expanding with a constraint”. The group began to stitch, glue, cut, slice and mill the boards, altering the material in its dried form to thereby direct its later transformation in water. They utilised experimental techniques whose unpredictability was compounded by the fact that each board behaves differently when expanded and dried. “We were suddenly confronted with a material that had such a stubbornness in its own behaviour and which nobody had any experience with,” Kabel says. “It was like designing in four or five dimensions instead of in three.”

The key to navigating this process, the designers realised, was to develop a new construction language for the material – one that would accommodate its shape memory. “When we design something in, for example, wood or textile or metal, we have lots of references of what could be an object made out of those materials,” Richoz says. “But here with the sponge, there are no references. So it was a real exploration to define what would be a seductive language for an object or furniture with this material.” One of the key challenges surrounding this process, for instance, is water weight – cellulose sponge can absorb up to 20 times its own mass in liquid, prompting the material

After all, compressed cellulose sponge isn’t very spongy.

Instead, it appears as a flat, yellow board, a little like thin Weetabix. It’s dry looking, arid even, but the moment that it’s placed into water, it begins to drink rapidly, swelling downwards along its axis of compression. The dehydrated section of the cellulose may continue to float, but from its base begins to bloom damp sponge deep into the water. The cellulose grows wobbling-fat and full, its pores unfurl into plump cavities. This is, materially speaking, a return to a former state.

Cellulose sponge is created as a byproduct of the wood industry, formed from blending wood pulp with various vegetal fibres, sodium sulphate crystals and softeners. When mixed, these materials form a gelatinous slurry that is heated up to produce sponge, the sodium sulphate crystals melting away to leave the material’s familiar porous structure. This, then, is the original shape of which the sponge holds a material memory. Even if compressed, its original form is not lost. When submerged, the sponge recovers itself.

Under Pressure Solutions (UPS), a 2024 research project from Switzerland’s ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, examines this property of cellulose foam’s shape memory in relation to furniture and object design. Home furnishings are frequently bulky and expensive to ship, the project team reasoned, which presents a barrier to the kind of easy online commerce that is commonplace in other fields. “There seemed to be a distance between the way a new generation thinks around objects, and how the furniture industry was behaving,” explains Camille Blin, the project lead and head of ECAL’s product design MA. “So the initial idea was to say, ‘Maybe there’s a way to help the furniture industry to survive better in the world of the internet.’”

One way of achieving this, Blin and his ECAL research associates Christophe Guberan and Anthony Guex reasoned, would be the creation of objects using a material that could transition between a compressed and expanded form.

Working with ECAL’s MA students, the UPS team sifted through 150 potential materials before settling on cellulose sponge: a material that is biodegradable, readily accessible, and possesses considerable structural strength when dried. “It feels quite new,” Guex explains, adding that, while cellulose sponge 50

An assortment of cellulose sponge objects, designed by Camille Blin, Christophe Guberan, Anthony Guex, Chris Kabel and Julie Richoz.

to sag as it expands. “We had a sense of [successful] details and connections on a small scale,” Guberan notes, “but the main challenge was to apply those to a bigger object, where it never works the same.”

As a result, the project’s original focus on chairs pivoted towards smaller-scale objects and furniture; early attempts at large-scale furniture, Blin explains, had proven “so huge, so heavy, so full of water” as to be impractical. To combat this issue, many of the UPS objects distribute their weight evenly about themselves (Guex’s radial coffee table, for instance, or Kabel’s stepped vase that sinks its weight into its base), or else are heavily perforated so as to aid the drying process.

“The goal of this material is to absorb as much water as possible,” Guberan says, “which we have to accept.”

This, after all, is the shape memory of cellulose sponge: a material that drinks up water in order to swell back into itself.

“Somehow, it’s a little bit like a more sensitive version of wood, which also reacts to water and humidity,” Blin suggests. “It’s definitely very organic as a material and a little bit like a living animal, sucking up the water.”

This sense of rawness and unpredictability, Kabel adds, carried through to the designers themselves. “I felt a little bit like I was reborn, which may sound dramatic,” he concedes, “but it’s such a crazy material that it put everything upside down. You had to really reassess everything you know, let everything go, and just be attentive to what is happening during the process.”

When it comes to cellulose foam, he concludes, only one thing is definite: “It’s certainly very thirsty.” E N D Oli Stratford is the editor-in-chief of Disegno.

Jasmine Deporta is a photographer exploring intimate narratives, revealing elements of everyday life.

Memory

Chris Kabel’s bowl; Anthony Guex’s stool (right).

52

Memory

54

Julie Richoz’s bottle rack; Chris Kabel’s vase (left).

Memory

Camille Blin’s stool or side table.

56

Sketches of Utopia from Hell Words Darran Anderson

The ornate ceiling of the Mendelsohn House in Olszytn, photographed by Carsten Krohn for his book Erich Mendelsohn: Buildings and Projects, published by Birkhäuser (image: Carsten Krohn).

Memory

The interior of Erich Mendelsohn’s Jewish Cemetery in Königsberg, which was completed in 1929 (image: courtesy of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg).

The cemetery was later destroyed by the Nazis (image: courtesy of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg).

A 1927 model for the cemetery (image: courtesy of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg).

58

In the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, north London, dozens of headstones are huddled together in a bizarre tableau. Until its fall two years ago, they encircled an ash tree like figures kneeling in worship or grief. Surprisingly, the arrangement was the work of Thomas Hardy, future novelist, poet and thenjunior architect. He’d been assigned the task of dispensing with the gravestones by the Bishop of London to make way for the railways but, by rearranging them as a decorative spolia, instead saved them from a fate he’d later confront in his poem ‘The To-Be-Forgotten’: “Our future second death is near; / When, with the living, memory of us numbs, / And blank oblivion comes!”

It’s a short walk to King’s Cross station from the Hardy Tree and, from there, a series of trains to the airport and the skies over the continent. There are places where history abruptly shifts tracks, changing the lives of millions. Two gunshots outside Moritz Schiller’s delicatessen in Sarajevo on a summer’s morning in 1914. Mould on a petri dish in a Paddington hospital in 1928. My destination is one such place. A landscape of islands and forests, it resembles a picturesque wilderness, a historical hinterland. Yet it was here in the Masurian Lakes that Tsarist Russia began to fall apart, with the army halted then decimated by German forces, eventually leading to the end of 300 years of the Romanov dynasty, the Bolshevik coup and all that followed, with the rise of communism and fascism. The airport, near Szymany in northeast Poland, is quiet and near empty. All that can be heard outside is birdsong, belying the significance this place once had. Less than 10 miles from here, the commander of the Russian Second Army, Alexander Samsonov, defeated and disgraced, went into the woods and shot himself. The airfield itself would be used by the Luftwaffe during the Nazi invasion of Poland, which sparked the second world war. An hour and a half’s drive away are the ruins of Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair. It’s a landscape saturated in history, much concealed.

Reading old books on the region, I noticed the difference between the place names in the texts and the train stations we pass through. Szczytno, Pasym and Klewki were once Ortelsburg, Passenheim and Klaukendorf. My destination, the city of Olsztyn, was Allenstein. Part of East Prussia is now Poland. The war and ethnic cleansing that took place here is scarcely conceivable, even in our violent present. It wasn’t

simply a change in history. For millions, it was the end of the world.

I’d come to Olsztyn to visit a building that, given the odds, shouldn’t have survived. Long before I knew his name, Erich Mendelsohn was my favourite architect.

As a child, surrounded by the bombed-out militarised architecture of my native Northern Ireland, I’d glimpse otherworlds in the streamline moderne architecture occasionally found on the coast and in art deco cinemas.

They felt like pastel and neon palaces of the future.

Though they had many precedents, Mendelsohn was the driving force in this dynamic form of modernism.

Here was an architect who was as much artist as engineer, balancing functionalism with sensuality, giving character, humanity, poetics, even music (one building, his Schocken Department Store in Stuttgart, was inspired by a Bach recital) to forms that might otherwise have been austere and technocratic. I’ve been on a pilgrimage ever since. The biomorphic spaceship Einstein Tower in Potsdam. His surviving Schocken stores which look as capable of velocity as any aircraft or ocean liner. The exquisite De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, where every fitting is prime gesamtkunstwerk, from the swirling stairwell onwards. Mendelsohn’s buildings feel imbued with an “anything is possible” spirit. Yet he dreamed up these visions in the midst of hell.

In a 1948 lecture at the University of Los Angeles, Mendelsohn would recall: “In 1917, with the Kaiser’s army at the Russian front, in the unreal world of dugouts and trenches, my architectural dreams [were] the only reality.” To escape “the silent terror of no-man’s land” punctuated by “the terrifying din of rapid fire”, he spent his nights writing letters home to his love, Luise Maas. In the margins, he sketched fantastical buildings never seen before, clinging to the prospect of a new world in the murderous ruins of the old.

The writer Marcel Krueger meets me at the station.

I’ve known him for a few years now; he is thoughtful, stoical, understated, a gentleman, and many other things I’m not. Without pretence and as comfortable discussing heavy metal as obscure Mitteleuropean literature. He was born in the Bergisches Land in western Germany, lives mostly in Ireland, but has ancestral roots here in Poland (he’s written and spoken in recent years on the role his family members played in the Polish Resistance). In 2019, he was awarded a writing residency in Olsztyn (“quite the opposite of a quiet retreat in the countryside”), primarily with

Memory

The Mendelsohn House was built in Olszytn, Poland, Mendelsohn’s home city (image: courtesy of the Borussia Foundation).

The building was designed as a Bet Tahara (image: courtesy of the Borussia Foundation).

The building has little in common with much of Mendelsohn’s later work; it was the architect’s first building (image: courtesy of the Borussia Foundation).

60

The exterior of the Mendelsohn House (image: Carsten Krohn).

The Mendelsohn House is highly ornate in its decoration, with touches of art nouveau (image: courtesy of the Borussia Foundation).

Memory

the Borussia Foundation, which works on cross-cultural heritage and dialogue, and which also revitalised Mendelsohn’s first building. For Marcel, it’s a return in spatial terms to somewhere forever lost in time.

His grandmother Cäcilie Anna Barabasch grew up not far from Allenstein/Olsztyn. In 1945, she was deported with hundreds of thousands of other women, as forced labourers, to the Soviet Union. After four years, she made it to West Germany where some of her family had settled in Solingen. Marcel grew up listening to stories of her hometown, which she would never see again.

As we walk around the city, the layers of history become apparent. The epic High Gate into the Old Town. The brick gothic castle with its pagan Baba Pruska and statue of Copernicus, who battled Teutonic knights in between solving cosmic mysteries. The plaque to Mendelsohn at the site of his childhood home. We end up at the Monument to the Liberation of the Warmian and Masurian Lands, a memorial to the Soviet troops who freed the area from the Nazis (and then freed the Poles from their independence). Built from the rubble of the Tannenberg Memorial, it was initially called the Monument of Gratitude for the Red Army, but locals referred to it as “the gallows”. It is now fenced off and covered in anti-Putin, pro-Ukraine graffiti. There’s talk, Marcel informs me, of taking a wrecking ball to it. The streets are a palimpsest, with new layers being added while others are written over.

We plan to meet again later, at the Mendelsohn House, but I arrive early. Initially, it seems the wrong address: it’s nondescript, without the verve and imagination of the architect’s later work. Next to the building is a long, wooded field. It should feel serene, but there’s a sense of unease, accentuated by the overgrown steps leading nowhere. Marcel arrives with Kornelia Kurowska from the Borussia Olsztyn cultural organisation, who shows us around the restored site to discover the wonders that are well-hidden from outside. It was a Bet Tahara, where Jewish dead bodies were prepared for burial; a place of mourning but also ritual and care. It’s atmospheric and ornate, with stars of David everywhere and traces of art nouveau.

A building before Mendelsohn found his voice (echoing the mystical influence of the Blue Rider group, whose members were his friends at the time), but also reflecting thousands of years of history. At its core is an astonishing hall that feels like being inside a pyramid, with a ceiling that is esoteric and celestial in the half-light. The survival of this building would seem miraculous if

the lives of the Jewish population of Olsztyn and beyond had been similarly spared during the Holocaust.

The city had been a base of the murder detachment Einsatzgruppe V (EG V-Allenstein) during the second world war, operated under the command of Ernst Damzog, who had a leading hand in establishing Chełmno death camp. He and his subordinates would be responsible for the death of countless Polish citizens, including hospital patients, teachers and children, and for the deportation and murder of Polish/Prussian Jewish families in ghettos and concentration camps.

It’s only as I’m leaving the venue that I see, in a corner, piles of smashed headstones with Hebrew writing, and realise the adjoining field had once been a graveyard.

For decades, my late father worked as a gardenergroundsman for Derry city council in the local cemetery.

Back then, kids were merciless and the prevailing taunt I’d receive at school was “your da is a gravedigger”, which felt – inexplicably, I realise now, given the nobility of the profession – shameful, and there were times when I disowned him. Later, I’d realise what I owed.

The cemetery was a repository of memory, documenting wars, epidemics, colonisation, seafaring, massacres, culture and resistance. You investigated history there simply by walking, something that has informed most of my work since. My father would bring back antique objects he dug up, all containing buried stories, which would similarly inspire my memoir Inventory (2020).

There were other lessons. Though the cemetery was geometric, its personality was in its quirks – the “devil’s tree”, for example, a dead but still-standing willow, with gnarled leafless branches set against the omnipresent rainclouds of Derry. Though a place of the dead, it was a thriving ecosystem with hares, squirrels and bats. And though death is the leveller between all peoples, even this place of meditation and sorrow was not immune to division. Desecrations of graves took place here in both 2016 and 2024, and while the motives remain unclear, it is clear in such contentious times that even the dead cannot escape personal vendettas, conflict or societal decline. Politics will not let even the dead rest easy.

Cemeteries may feel like a kind of antechamber separated from life, a threshold between this world and the next, but this is illusory. There are cities such as Manila and Cairo where thousands reside among necropolis tombs. Equally, there are graveyards (Père Lachaise in Paris, for example, and the Central Sofia cemetery) where executions took place. In Derry and 62

Belfast, the funerals of those killed in the Troubles were often highly impassioned, the focus of community rage, security service surveillance and, as in the case of the Milltown massacre, all-out murderous attacks.

Greed and desperation have also encouraged the defiling of sacred resting sites. Ancient Egyptian tombs were raided so comprehensively that caput mortuum, a brown pigment highly sought after by painters, was developed from pulverised mummy flesh. In Edinburgh and London, alongside rusting mortsafes, watchtowers in St Cuthbert’s Kirkyard and Holy Sepulchre London are reminders that cities were once haunted by bodysnatchers or resurrection men, who would unearth and sell corpses to anatomists. Graverobbing still thrives, with thieves breaking into 2,000-year-old tombs in Taosi cemetery in China earlier this year.

In ancient Egypt, memorials to the late pharaohs Hatshepsut and Akhenaten were vandalised by their successors to alter history and even cause their souls to become lost in the afterlife. The ancient Romans would remove all memory of controversial figures through the process of damnatio memoriae, a practice still enacted today with Nazis, serial killers and jihadists buried in unmarked graves or at sea, either in disgrace or to prevent future worship. The destruction of graves is never simply a political or financial act: necroviolence always has a personal component. It’s intended to demoralise, degrade, uproot or ultimately erase a population. It begins with prominent individuals: after German nationalists murdered the Polish activist Bogumił Linka in Allenstein, they also targeted his grave. The final intention was not just to eradicate these peoples. It was to erase any trace that they’d existed to begin with.

Necroviolence exists still. Following Sri Lanka’s civil war, the military destroyed the graves of Tamil fighters and rumours of mass grave sites go ignored.

Myanmar’s regime has similarly bulldozed Rohingya mass graves to hide the evidence. As well as dismantling mosques, the Chinese government has been razing Uighur graves across the country. Growing up during the tit-for-tat blood feud of the Troubles, it’s hard to witness the same cycles perpetuate elsewhere. In the Middle East, there have been successive waves of necroviolence since the end of the second world war, from Jordanian forces defiling Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives, to the Israel Defense Forces’ extensive desecration of Palestinian graves. In the West, we’re not immune, with memorials (such as the

Stolpersteine stumbling stones in Rome) being defaced and certain cemeteries requiring 24-hour security.

All of this pales next to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. “The living are more demanding; the dead can wait,” Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote in If This is Man, his account of life in Auschwitz.

Yet to neglect the dead can be ruinous, for their treatment is a warning sign. Just as those who burn books will eventually burn people (as German poet Heinrich Heine put it), those who would unearth and defile the dead will do so to the living. Any destruction of collective memory bodes ill. Amnesia aids the killers.

Just before the invasion of Poland, Hitler referred back to one of the most horrific human rights abuses of the first world war, asking: “Who speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” In the months prior to the beginning of the gassing of Jewish people at Auschwitz, the Jewish cemetery there was destroyed.

Erich Mendelsohn would escape the Holocaust, fleeing the Nazis. Disillusioned by the Soviet Union and Israel in turn, he moved to the US. He designed synagogues but his living was precarious, and he ended up working for the United States Air Force constructing authentically furnished German housing, to practise firebombing on before the real thing. He would not return home. Having somehow survived, albeit in a diminished state, Mendelsohn House was reinvented by the Soviets as a government archive.

Following a period of looting and official antisemitism during the Polish People’s Republic, the adjoining cemetery’s headstones were “repurposed” to become construction materials for the local Casablanca restaurant. A number of headstones have since been salvaged, in varying states of disrepair. The building now belongs not to utopian dreams or the dystopias that followed, but to the bringing together of peoples, the acceptance of the complexities and brutalities of past and present, but still reaching out in spite of this.

The space is now used to host events and exhibitions designed to deepen communication, interest and empathy in what was once a region beset by conflict and division. “Once, this place was for the dead,” Marcel tells me. “Now, it’s for the living.” The debt we owe is to both the living and the dead. What we honour and dishonour is the surest indication, all belief and vanity aside, of who we really are. E N D Darran Anderson is an Irish freelance writer, currently researching postcolonial urban explorers.

Memory

Do Androids Dream of Acid House?

Words Frank Broughton

The AI Acid cassette, created by Yuri Suzuki (image: courtesy of Yuri Suzuki).

64

Without a tailwind or extra molecules, my body’s bpm is about 120. Provided the surface is good, it still dances well at lower speeds, using different styles, but it hits problems over 135. Whatever the velocity, my angles and arcs want a grooove, a reliable motor they can lock onto. My default choreography likes those circular rhythms that have the next cycle moving out while the current one is still working its way round. Above all, I crave repetition. Music that freezes time by looping it forever. Holding those calligraphic shapes in suspension so you can really bite down on the electricity they spark in your brain.

The right sequence of thumps, pats, clicks and crashes can make you weightless. A great rhythm lifts you off the ground so your energy is spent dancing back to Earth rather than pushing against it. To do their best work, my joints need beats with bounce; anything too inelastic becomes an effort. Last weekend I stayed up all night in a forest with Glasgow’s Optimo. They kept me on my toes despite the mud, long after bedtime, even with their high-energy and hardcore interludes, because whatever they played always had plenty of bounce.

I’m all about the one. The funk. Or a solid four-onthe-floor. I can move to drum and bass if I have to, but its skippiness chokes me with reverb. All those beats start to bottleneck and defuse each other. To try and meet the music, I gear down into the groove and dance on the half-speed like reggae. But that feels as if I’m not respecting the track – not paying back enough energy. So every few minutes I go wild to the full tempo. But that’s no good either because I still can’t relax into an unbroken rotation. Also, it sounds too much like 1994.

For a dancer, music is furniture. Architecture.

It’s the world you move around. The kickdrums thump out a path, cymbals slash the air, silver strings stretch tight above your head. The best definition of music is “organised noise”. When you’re dancing, the producers and musicians design environments for you, then the DJ leads you through them.

Sound artist Yuri Suzuki builds musical scenery. His raw materials are sound and innovation, combined in curious instruments that invite participation and generate smiles. “I want to create a playground,” he says. This puts him at the sharp end of design: making

seductive objects to interact with humans. Modules clip together like a construction toy to clarify the mysteries of electronic circuits. A toy train turns your scribbles on paper into its sound track. Beautiful sculptures translate digital signals back into analogue instruments. A microphone lets you bash a drumkit with your voice.

With roots in product design, Suzuki began his career making fun musical electronics for Japanese pranksters Maywa Denki and playful synths for Teenage Engineering. He is intrigued by the effect of sound on humans in all its forms, toying with audio in public art pieces staged from Milan to Singapore, Tokyo to San Francisco. He has lectured at the Royal College of Art, was previously a partner at design consultancy Pentagram and a member of the BBC’s New Radiophonic Workshop, and he’s also both a producer and a DJ in the conventional sense, with many releases, including on foundational Chicago house label Trax.

His latest work is an invitation back to 1988, when the dual technologies of ecstasy and house music came together in thousands of dancing bodies. The resulting “acid house” culture brought a fractured nation together in the face of Thatcher’s militant de-industrialisation for a wave of illegality: raves, warehouse parties, sound system convoys. It transformed social attitudes, broke down class and race barriers, and defused UK pop culture’s violent tribalism.

“Techno and acid house brought up so much cultural possibility,” Suzuki says. “My work is a perspective on design and art, but I always feel attracted to Detroit and Chicago and techno culture. That’s my main inspiration at the moment.” For a Japanese kid born in 1980, the period is fascinating. “The second summer of love in the UK in 1988 created a movement,” he says. “It’s not only one music scene, the whole country was into that acid house party. It was a protest as well, against the Conservative government. The producers were activist, like KLF, Psychic TV and Underground Resistance.”

The revolution was British, the music originally American, but at the heart of it was Japanese product design. Dance music in the 70s needed expensive studios, professional producers and engineers, session musicians, often whole orchestras. But in the mid1980s, house and techno was the sound of amateurs and consumer electronics: Akai samplers, Roland drum machines, Casio keyboards. Clubbers and DJs grabbed the means of production and put the machines centre stage.

Memory

The Welcome Chorus at the Turner Contemporary (image: courtesy of Yuri Suzuki).

Scott’s Dream, with artwork by Astrid Stavro (image: courtesy of Yuri Suzuki).

66

Yuri Suzuki by Trax Records (image: courtesy of Yuri Suzuki).

Memory

Acid house was a specific genre style before it was a movement. While most early Chicago house records seemed content to reheat disco, “acid” house was aggressively futuristic: alien tracks built from warbling digital squirts. This style, first encoded in Phuture’s 1987 release ‘Acid Tracks’, was as much discovered as created: the signature acid squelch came from the presets of a Roland TB-303 Bass Line machine, pushed to distortion levels by a trio of Chicago DJs. As DJ Pierre told me in 1997: “I started turning the knobs up and tweaking it and they were like, ‘Yeah, I like it, keep doing what you’re doing.’ We just did that, made a beat to it, and the rest is history.” Here was music derived purely from the soul of the machine.

Suzuki’s AI ACID: Digital Echoes of Second Summer is an album of tracks evoking the classic acid sound.

As a text-originated AI project, it is built from nothing more than words and memories – words input by the artist evoke machine memories of the world’s music.

“I was thinking, what if AI can create acid house, acid techno, even if there’s no human hand in there apart from writing text?” he tells me.

The best AI art can feel like it was found, not made, and Suzuki’s work revels in this ambiguity. At first the AI model he used – Google’s MusicLM – was largely ignorant of the style descriptions he was entering.

The public AI music sites have been slow to develop much sophistication because copyright limits the data they can be trained on, and most platforms won’t let you reference actual artists or tracks in your prompts.

But Suzuki persevered, and the AI eventually got on one matey.

The tracks are each just 1m20s long, suggesting fragments. They zip through different acid styles, and could conceivably be discoveries as much as creations, the spoils of a dusty vinyl basement. Suzuki’s description invokes “the crossroads of tradition and innovation… an unforeseen fusion of coincidence”. Are we listening to history or memory? Pastiche, homage or re-creation?

The artist’s prompts instructed a machine mind to generate unique new music in a style based on its accumulated knowledge of a historical genre created from the presets of a failed 1981 music machine (which itself was designed by a human mind, Tadao Kikumoto).

There are a lot of layers.

At around 150bpm these tracks are well beyond my velocity, and the beats are thunderously inflexible.

I close my eyes to enjoy them, starting to imagine a dark basement pulsing with strobes. There would be

smoke and physicality, people crammed in dancing fit to bust. I recall moments when the energy drove me to that place: a Richie Hawtin rave in Toronto, a club called NASA in 90s New York. I summon others that I missed: Detroit’s Music Institute, Chicago’s Music Box. Or the raves around Slough and Hazlemere, immortalised by Gavin Watson in Raving ’89, a book I published. “More punk than punk ever was,” was his brother Neville’s verdict, who makes great acidinflected music to this day. Then I think of visual projects by AI artist Omar Karim, who “discovers” images of the scenes I’m imagining, undeveloped film found on the floor of raves that never happened.

There’s another way to think of AI art. It’s not that this music, or this image, sprang from nowhere; rather it’s a co-creation, a collaboration with thousands of previous minds. AI’s ability to juggle vast datasets brings the power of composite creativity. Some artists develop fictional creatives with rich backstories – a 1950s Martian photographer, an edgy Victorian stylist.

Another approach is to crowdsource art from multiple living minds.

In his 2019 sculpture The Welcome Chorus at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, Suzuki generated Kentish folk songs from the transcribed words of 3,000 people. Workshops across the county gathered their thoughts, and an AI trained on local folk melodies turned them into songs. Gallery visitors were met by 12 singing horns at people height. “Each horn has one specific voice,” he explained, “so you feel like you are standing in front of a choir.” Despite their synthetic voices, the songs were warm and authentic, and the sculpture conjured a choir’s communal spirit.

AI made this egalitarianism a reality. “It’s an impossible task for one human being to consolidate 3,000 people’s different opinions to make one song,” says Suzuki.

“The only way to do it was use an algorithm to learn about old lyrics and melodies, based on the people’s contributions, then create brand new songs.” Instead of an artist selecting a few privileged elements, he made a composite mind – a genuine 3,000-way collab.

Another AI piece reclaimed the memory of a forgotten music machine. Suzuki tells of Raymond Scott, a 50s engineer and bandleader who built the first sequencer, the Electronium. An early milestone of generative music, this played a unique counterpoint to any melody the user entered. Scott used it successfully for years, composing music for the Looney Tunes 68

cartoons, and also became the “chief researcher for advanced music” at Motown, where label boss Berry Gordy believed the Electronium would automate his pop conveyor belt. “It’s the first instrument that writes music on its own,” boasted Scott. “And it never writes the same song twice.”

With the machine long decayed, its current owner, Mark Mothersbaugh of avant-popsters Devo, had given up hope of its resurrection. But Suzuki and his AI collaborators were able to make it sing again. “I knew AI was capable of doing this, because what Raymond Scott wanted to do was AI music. He wanted to make generative music.” Suzuki created an AI-derived model of the machine from its circuit diagrams and, using Google’s Magenta platform, coaxed music from it, releasing an album of the results in 2020 that he named Scott’s Dream.

As a DJ, Suzuki is practised in musical seduction.

“Engagement of the audience is the main thing I seek,” he says. “I always look at people, how they behave, how they react to the music. I want the next track to make a natural transition, I like to make a narrative connection also – a link to a sample or a producer or lyrics, but most important is to predict how the record will make the audience feel.” He keeps a careful eye on the dancefloor’s energy, too. “It has waves. People get tired, so you need to make an oscillation through the night.”

Good DJ-dancer communication is two-way, and the same logic applies to his sculptures. “I’m working a lot with public art installations and the process is very similar – how the audience or the visitors interact with the installation is very similar to the DJ process.”

Much of Suzuki’s work reflects the science behind music’s power to engage.“I’m interested in ambient projects because it brings comfort to people,” he says.

“Human brains find it easy to hear patterns, but with ambient music you can avoid duplication. It needs to be something unrecognisable, a loop. White noise is particularly good, because we remember being inside our mother’s body, so white noise is very calming.”

Alongside his art, Suzuki has a commercial practice developing sonic branding, something I’ve done too. We share the frustration of seeing so few clients appreciate the power of audio. Most brands have hundreds of pages of visual guidelines but often don’t think at all about what their world might sound like, despite the fact that hearing is a more emotional

sense than sight, and aural recognition is far faster.

“We think with our eyes and we feel with our ears,” as Malcolm Gladwell puts it.

There are other certainties. Humans have mirroring circuits, so we get more pleasure from music if we can see others enjoying it too. And recent research reveals that we possess “aesthetic resonance”: when our brains are lost in music, they don’t just receive it passively, neurons fire in response and create sympathetic waves.

In a measurable way, your brain is vibing along, a bit like dancing. Thanks to this, an AI can tell from a brain scan which song we’re listening to.

An associated phenomenon emerges when you play with the separation of the sound signal. “I did some pieces using binaural sound,” says Suzuki. “There’s a lot of research on it. Basically, if the left and right ears have a slightly different beat tempo in the low frequency, it makes concentration better – it’s easier to focus on work.”

Music is often used for performance training.

“People are saying sound is a drug in a way, a way to increase your body’s performance,” Suzuki says.

“I think sound definitely has that capability to increase your hormones.” High-tempo pulse-raising workout tunes are the obvious example, but the opposite effect is possible, too. Olympic archers practise against a heavy metal soundtrack so they can train for extreme relaxing under pressure.

Music works by balancing familiarity with surprise.

Perhaps we have this tension because our hearing evolved with a dual function: sound comforts us with a heartbeat or a lullaby, but the same sense alerts us to wild beasts and dangers overhead. Great music makes the balance precarious. Trusted rhythms and reassuring chord progressions pitted against unpredictable rimshots, a guitar ambush, a scribbly mess of synth.

Regularity v improvisation, order v chaos, expectation v shock. My noodle quotient is low: I can’t engage with music that revels in its irregularity without also propelling itself with something solid. All jazz, no booty and I’m out. Acid music is powerful because its structures can be really simple, even when its bubbly machine textures are bewildering.

Electronic music machines exploded the nonmusician’s possibilities, letting DJs and club scenes evolve entirely new styles, including acid house and many before and after. Today, the machines are powerful enough to shortcut the process and take on the whole creative brief. Yuri Suzuki’s ambition is to

Memory

stir the circuits at the highest level. “I’m quite excited about creating a brand new music genre,” he says.

“That’s my dream.” E N D Frank Broughton is a dance music historian, writer, creative director and co-author with Bill Brewster of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life – The History of the Disc Jockey. A fully revised edition has just been released in paperback, with a foreword from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. Available now from all bookshops or from WhiteRabbitBooks.co.uk.

AI Acid’s artwork by Jody Hudson-Powell and team at Pentagram (image: courtesy of Yuri Suzuki).

70

A Wellspring Words Lutivini Majanja Photographs Rogers Ouma

Memory

Mount Suswa’s network of lava tube caves is ubiquitous. Historically they were used as hideouts by freedom fighters during Kenya’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule, and today a number are used as places of rest, social gathering and worship. Some caves are considered sacred and access to them is restricted. The caves are long and narrow, and many are virtually impossible to reach for humans, but they nevertheless support whole ecosystems of vegetation and wildlife. The outer and inner craters’ landscape is a haven for wildlife, including leopards, snakes, mongooses and gazelles.

Baboons escaping predators often shelter in the caves, in particular the one known as the Baboon Parliament. Giant mastiff bats roost in this same cave. As the sun sets in its entrance, a daily ritual takes place: baboons return to their shelter after the day’s exploits, while bats depart for the night.

In the morning, they exchange places once more.

it is. One gets so accustomed to the chaos of the city that these pockets of silence feel a little eerie. During our conversations here, I’m conscious of a slight echo in the room. Cow bells suspended from a wall, obsidian rocks from a dismantled exhibition, and illustrations etched on cowhides all serve to show how far the bureau’s focus is from the urban milieu. Here, both Karanja and Mutegi speak about reverse futurism – the idea that one cannot ignore the past, because at some point it will catch up with you.

Although it is a commercial architecture practice, cave_bureau also designates time and resources to researching the social and geological history and the present-day reality of Kenya’s caves. In 2017, for instance, the studio started the Anthropocene Museum, a roaming institution dedicated to exploring our current epoch in which the collective activities of humans have substantially altered the Earth’s natural habitats, as well as its entanglements with the past. In this respect, studying the land and its geological layers becomes a means of exploring both human history and contemporary existence. The seventh iteration of the project, New Age Africana, hosted at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2023, used woven rattan to map a section of Kenya’s Shimoni cave – a site used during the transatlantic slave trade as a holding chamber for enslaved people trafficked from east Africa.

By contrast, the third edition, Obsidian Rain – which was staged at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale – recreated a section of Kenya’s Mbai cave, which was used as a refuge by Mau Mau freedom fighters during British colonial rule, orchestrating the resistance from there and imagining a new state.

Although the project began life in 2017, the Anthropocene Museum accelerated at the height of the pandemic. “The fact is that we were looking at caves and our interest in geology coincided,” Karanja tells me, “especially as we transitioned towards the period of the Covid-19 pandemic – a point when there was huge consciousness about environmental change.”

As Karanja explains, cave_bureau felt it was imperative to draw links between climate change and colonialism, and their relationship to east Africa as the place of origin for early humans. In a roundabout way, the Anthropocene Museum attempts to make explicit the links between the architectural profession and the social sciences. It argues that an acknowledgement of and consciousness about caves is critical in east

After Stella Mutegi and Kabage Karanja lost their jobs at a commercial architecture firm in 2014, they turned their attention to caves such as these. The pair were disconcerted with the direction that architecture in Kenya had taken. As Karanja tells me: “It is overly commercialised and often [ignores] the past and local heritage.” As such, the studio they founded in response to this, cave_bureau, focuses on east Africa’s caves as the cradle of humankind. Caves were humans’ first shelter, the source of ideas about how buildings ought to function. “Geology and architecture are conjoined at the hip,” says Karanja. “Without geology, we would not have perceived what a building would be.”

The cave_bureau office is located in Kilimani, a part of Nairobi whose skyline is transforming. The once low-density population neighbourhood is today a focal point of aggressive destruction of old, mostly residential buildings, narrow streets and spacious lawns dating back from pre-independence Kenya to the 1990s. These are now being replaced with multistorey buildings for commercial and residential use. The sights and sounds of concrete mixers, iron sheet safety walls, puddles of murky water, damaged footpaths, random road detours, and an increasing absence of green vegetation are disheartening for anyone who has lived in Nairobi for a long time. Alternatively, one might see this as a welcome construction boom.

The building where cave_bureau is located has so far held off this disruption. I’m surprised by how quiet 72

A herd of livestock at Mount Suswa.

Cave_bureau’s design for the MMRS or Maasai migratory reservoir structure (image: courtesy of cave_bureau).

Kabage Karanja, co-founder of cave_bureau, and Lutivini Majanja.

Memory

The Baboon Parliament cave has undergone a series of roof collapses, leaving a section that is dome-shaped with a 10m-diameter oculus – an element that cave_bureau describes as “the origin of Rome’s Pantheon, preceding it by 1.7 million years” (image: courtesy of cave_bureau).

74

Africa: this is where human species first encountered caves before migrating across Africa and on to the rest of the world. Through caves, humans were perceiving what architecture is and could be.

The current iteration of the project is grounded in this expanded vision of architecture, and centres around the geology of Mount Suswa. Located in the southwest of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, Mount Suswa is just over a three-hour drive from the capital, Nairobi. Until the construction of the Nairobi-Suswa railway line in 2019, along with recent expansion of its local road networks, this region wasn’t easy to get to. Even today, however, its newfound accessibility remains relative.

To the untrained eye, it is odd to think of Mount Suswa as being a mountain. One doesn’t experience the expected sharp incline. Cars, people and livestock can, with minimal effort, enter the outer crater. The inner crater is a steep but accessible climb. One can’t help but marvel at the dense forest and greenery thriving both inside and around it. Though Mount Suswa is an active volcano, people still live, go to school and conduct most, if not all, of their daily affairs in its outer crater, which is run as a conservancy by the Maasai community who reside there. They supplement their water supply, which has been affected by prolonged droughts, by tapping the volcanic steam that rises from cracks in the ground.

Within living memory, there was a time when Mount Suswa was not as water scarce as it is now. Though there have always been dry seasons, the Maasai now have barely enough water to complete basic domestic tasks or give to their animals. “Sometimes people who don’t have any water just sleep hungry because they cannot cook,” says Lydia Sarite Kiriolale, a translator who grew up in Mount Suswa. “Sometimes children don’t go to school because there’s no water to cook.”

This problem, which is connected to the climate crisis, has been exacerbated by the fact that the Maasai, who are pastoralists, no longer have access to large tracts of land to which they could previously relocate, due to increased urbanisation. Laws that prohibit trespassing on private property further restrict their movement.

Over the past six years, cave_bureau has forged a relationship with the community who run the Mount Suswa Conservancy, recently signing a 25-year land lease with Lepoyian Ole Njoshoi, an elder of the community, on the understanding that the land’s use should benefit the community. This agreement will enable a new attempt to address water scarcity by

redesigning the local rainwater reservoir. The existing reservoir is not as efficient as it could be, and the recent arrival of marabou storks, who defecate and urinate in the water, has made it less than ideal for domestic use.

From the start of the project, cave_bureau has engaged local professionals to work alongside the studio in determining the best way to implement its plan to reduce water scarcity, keen to find solutions without relying on experts from abroad. So far, the experts include geologists, hydrologists, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, anthropologists, gender equality experts, quantity surveyors, landscape designers, ecologists and livestock health scientists.

A point of pride is that all of these collaborators are Africans, and many are Kenyans, which in itself undoes long-held stereotypes that there is no local expertise in the region. Underlying much of cave_bureau’s work is the feeling that architectural theories tend not to come from Africa, and that there are few Africans who are contributing to academic discourse. “We are not believed to be smart enough to grapple with these complex ideas of the Anthropocene, of de-colonial thought and what that means today,” says Karanja.

“It’s difficult to get away from the established thought that practices who influence the future of architecture don’t come from here, and instead tend to come from major cities of the world, such as Dubai and New York.”

Over the years, both Karanja and Mutegi have been invited to lecture at graduate schools worldwide, and have engaged with the work of architectural and social theorists such as Lesley Lokko, Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant, all of whose works address colonialism and postcolonial struggles. One recent invitation came from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, providing an opportunity to delve into the social and historical contexts of a different continent. The studio led a semester-long research project around two caves in New York State – a project that became the fifth iteration of the Anthropocene Museum, titled Reinscribing New York City. “One of the caves was in Central Park, a place which was closed down in the 1930s because it was infamous for rape, murder and other crimes,” Mutegi tells me. “The other one was used by the native Americans of the Lenape tribe.

It was used as a burial site, and is one of the only places in New York that still has its original geology.

Memory

The cave_bureau team venture into one of the lava tube caves.

A rock face in Mount Suswa.

Mount Suswa.

76

Kabage Karanja.

The laser-scanned Shimoni coral cave in digital mesh form. The cave was used as a holding pen for enslaved people by the west African transtlantic slave trade (image: courtesy of cave_bureau).

Memory

The Dutch transformed [New York] completely and disregarded the people who owned that land.”

For Mutegi, their teaching has brought to the fore cave_bureau’s concern that historical and social contexts are often disregarded within their field. “Good architects do a site analysis, looking at all the parameters that affect a site, starting with the climate, the weather, which side is it orientated; north, south, west or east,” she explains. “Which side does the wind come from, where does noise come from, where does the road come from, who are the neighbours? These are just surface details. Asking about the history would reveal much more.”

“We are not academics,” Karanja emphasises. “We just connected these dots, and thought this is important, and now we are building the theories around what it means to identify [the cave] as a datum of architecture in terms of the Anthropocene, and climate change and how environmental degradation could return us to the cave.”

to the Geothermal Development Company, a government body tasked with developing steam fields and selling geothermal steam for electricity generation, Mount Suswa has an estimated potential of 750MW, which will be developed in phases. Presently, there are no specific dates for when the first phase will commence.

For Mount Suswa’s residents, it is a mix of positive anticipation and scepticism. “The government has started building proper access roads so that they can come to extract geothermal energy,” Kiriolale observes. “There is some hope that even as they work on the geothermal plant, they will recognise some of our challenges and help solve them. We know that the government’s intention is to extract geothermal energy but we don’t know yet if they will also be here to support and involve those of us who live here.”

The Maasai community were forcibly relocated to Mount Suswa during Kenya’s colonial era, having been evicted from their previous settlement when the country’s fertile lands were reserved for white settlers.

Many of the families who arrived here as a result of that displacement now make up the community that established and runs the Mount Suswa Conservancy.

The government’s plans are an issue of major concern for this community, who worry about the environmental degradation that building an industrial plant would entail, and they fear another displacement. Kenya’s history is replete with examples of people having been displaced from their land in the service of development or capitalist interests, barely receiving any compensation or restitution. The recent experiences of the Maasai and other indigenous communities who were relocated from the 1980s up until 2019 to pave the way for the expansion of the Olkaria geothermal plant in Nakuru County, for example, has been far from inspiring.

“The negative impacts of the geothermal industry on local communities are rarely, if ever, listed among its disadvantages,” historian and journalist Lotte Hughes wrote about the Olkaria resettlement in The Elephant, an online platform devoted to communitybased writing from Africa. “Issues of greatest concern to companies and funders have more to do with things like high upfront costs, technical challenges and high risks faced in the early stages of development. Too often, the negative impacts on humans, livestock and the environment seem to be regarded as collateral damage.” If the mountain were to become an industrial plant, this would likely be a catastrophe. The Suswa Conservancy community could, however, benefit if the

Within Mount Suswa’s outer crater, cave_bureau has begun exploring their theoretical ideas in practical reality. Working in tandem with experts and the Mount Suswa community – and with financial support from the re:arc institute, which funds architectural projects that address the root causes of climate breakdown – the studio is now developing two prototypes for the Anthropocene Museum: the aforementioned reservoir, and a volcanic steam harvester. Some of the issues it hopes to address include adapting ways of planting that improve living conditions, thinking about the soil around the reservoir and the water it collects, and any other means to improve the region. With any catchment of this nature, one has to also factor in shifts in humidity, and the kind of living organisms inhabiting the area.

Cave_bureau’s task is to show that it’s possible to improve steam harvesting, while the reservoir prototype will be extrapolated to a network that serves both the community and the wider ecosystem, eventually regenerating biodiversity. The ambition is that this entire community will never be in distress during drought conditions.

But cave_bureau’s plans could be disrupted. The Kenyan government’s long-term development blueprint, Kenya Vision 2030, outlines plans to increase power generation from geothermal sources – including the steam from Mount Suswa – to make Kenya Africa’s largest producer of geothermal energy. According 78

government involved them in the decision-making process; in this case, cave_bureau endeavours to make a case for extracting viable energy without detriment to the natural ecosystem. “The hope is that we put out work that is environmentally conscious and socially aware,” Karanja reiterates. “We shouldn’t go over our heads in our roles; the community is our base barometer to establish what we should do.”

Cave_bureau constantly grapples with architecture’s capitalist and postcolonial reality, exploring how caves have been used over millennia, whether as shelter or living spaces, as secret hideouts for people resisting colonialism, or as sacred spaces for worship that meld old and new forms of spiritual practice. Karanja’s personal interest in caves, for instance, was sparked when he was part of a boys’ club in the 1990s. The club created a space for urban teens to connect with the outdoors, receive mentorship and bond with their peers. Karanja was part of a group that hiked up and summited Mount Suswa and thereafter slept in one of its caves for the night – far more desirable than hauling tents up the mountain. This experience stuck with him, and has fed into his ideas about what cave_bureau can achieve, and his belief in the interconnectedness of caves and architecture. “The cave was that reference in terms of how we felt when we are inside a space, outside a space, and what we understand,” he says.

“When you look at the huge scale of human time, the cave and geology are directly linked.”

Mutegi’s passion for caves, meanwhile, grew from her first visit to the Mbai cave system at Kiambu County’s Paradise Lost resort, a trip she took soon after joining cave_bureau. It was, she explains to me, an experience that revealed the centrality of caves throughout human history, and the sheer diversity of the roles that they have played for the different communities who have inhabited them. “It’s been used over millennia, first by early man and in the recent past by the Mau Mau,” she tells me, “and now it’s used by young lovers going to steal kisses.” E N D Lutivini Majanja is a writer based in Nairobi.

Rogers Ouma is a photographer and cinematographer based between Cape Town and Nairobi.

Memory

Cave_bureau’s work at Mount Suswa is an ongoing collaboration with the local Maasai community.

Everyday Treasure

Knickknacks in charity shops; groceries on supermarket conveyor belts; compost by the sink – artist Nigel Shafran captures the everyday.

Published by Loose Joints, Workbooks: 1984-2024 gathers together 40 years of Shafran’s personal notes, sketches, pictures and day-to-day ephemera, displayed as full-page photographs of his dog-eared scrapbooks in which he catalogues them.

The books include scribbled calculations for his accounts, a patch of dead skin from the bottom of his big toe, and an annotated photo of himself in his bedroom. “ME! aged 26,” one arrow exclaims, while others point out a basket of loose change, a mug of tea, a football injury on his knee, and a feather he picked up in Wales.

Shafran’s detritus is both uniquely his own and so mundane as to be universal; his workbooks preserve fleeting moments that feel like they could have been cut and pasted from one’s own life. While his photography stirs up affection for dishes stacking up in the sink, or a partner’s stray hair wriggling on a bar of soap, his workbooks extend this compassionate gaze to an old photo of yourself, lying on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by everyday treasure. In the excerpt from Workbooks that follows, readers can catch a glimpse of this infectious tenderness.

80

82

84

86

Contents

88

90

92

94

Ancestors in the Making Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper seek meaning through form at the University of Arkansas

Malika Leiper and Stephen Burks, partners of industrial design studio Stephen Burks Man Made, joining clay slabs as part of their Ancestors project in development at the University of Arkansas School of Art.

Introduction Malika Leiper Words Najha Zigbi-Johnson Photographs Brandon Forrest Frederick Memory

Near to their ceramics studio, Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper forage for clay in the Tanglewood Branch creek in downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas. Earthenware clay, or terracotta, is characterised by its high iron content, which turns red or orange once fired. This clay is typically found in riverbeds and lakebeds where the ebb and flow of water over millions of years has deposited minerals, namely iron, into the ground.

98

Stephen and I are beginners when it comes to ceramics and we intend to stay that way. For the last six months, as visiting artists at the University of Arkansas School of Art, we’ve become students of these most ancient and universal of materials.

Through an ongoing body of sculptural furniturescale objects called The Ancestors, we’re learning how to mix, manipulate, fire and glaze clay. Our intention is not to become ceramics artists, nor to make a perfect work of clay. Rather, we’re searching for novel ways to apply the craft at various scales, through industrial processes, and in combination with other materials.

In the ceramics-mixing room, where our process begins, commercial sacks of dry powdered material are stacked six rows high onto pallet racks. Reading fantastical names such as custer feldspar, OM4 and redart, I have the impression of being in a medieval alchemist’s laboratory. In fact, these are the ingredients that make up the “clay bodies” – specific recipes for clay that will determine the plasticity, shrinkage rate, strength, colour and porosity of the material at its various stages of transformation.

The Ancestors is a new and ongoing body of work that gives value to our kinship ties as a means of building community and continuity across diverse temporalities and geographies. Most people can trace their lineage back three generations to at least six individuals: their great-grandparents, grandparents and parents. But if one were to instead go back just 10 generations in American history, around 250 years to 1774, their total number of direct ancestors would be 2,046 people. At that moment in time, the United States of America had not even been established.

Despite the brutality and bloodshed this country was founded upon, the land and its peoples date back even further.

The oldest known North American ceramics are shards of pots discovered on an island in the Savannah River between Georgia and South Carolina, and are believed to be 4,500-years-old. These artefacts, most likely used for cooking, are remnants of early huntergatherer societies dating from the late Archaic period.

Indigenous American societies mixed their clay with Spanish moss, which helped to extract the moisture from the raw material before firing. Like these ancient vessels, the clay bodies of our handmade Ancestors are a low-fire earthenware with a high content of grog,

a material that tempers the clay, preventing it from cracking as it dries.

Who are our ancestors? How do we pay homage to their memory and honour their presence in our lives through daily ritual and practice? We began to ask these questions during the tumultuous summer of 2020 when the pandemic converged with the Movement for Black Lives. As we marched the streets of downtown Brooklyn among crowds of protesters, we were compelled to consider what type of sacrifices our ancestors made just to get us here. Even today, the world witnesses the cold-blooded murder of African Americans at the hands of the police, while the United States faces the impossible reality of a second presidential term for a criminal who spreads hate and xenophobia. How did we get here? And how can the world of contemporary design move outside its narrow commercial boundaries into spaces where it is most needed?

As we give form to new ancestors in Arkansas, our practice has expanded into new territory. If commercial design is a box left closed, with each detail specified to the micron, then art is a box left open. Unlike in a typical design process, where the end goal is defined from the outset, the artistic process has no such predetermined destination. It’s a new way of working, and it requires a degree of faith.

Malika Leiper is a writer and the cultural director of Stephen Burks Man Made.

The thing about the ancestors is they choose us, and when we listen, we become instruments for their will and wisdom. Increasingly, as I grow into myself, my life has become animated by this truth.

When I heed spirit’s call – those echoes and late night whispers – I tend to find myself in the right spaces, with the right people, doing the type of work that feeds my soul. In this sense, I think they conspired for my creative kinship with Malika Leiper and Stephen Burks, and their studio Stephen Burks Man Made. It’s one of those reciprocal, always growing and generous types of relationships. It feels good.

Born into a family of artists and organisers, I have long been rooted in the Black radical tradition and a type of creative abstraction. I’ve always believed that art in

Memory

Malika Leiper working with Amplifiers at various scales at the University of Arkansas School of Art as part of the studio’s parallel veneration project, Spirit Houses.

100

Ancestors (Half A Man). The title is a reference to the “Three-Fifths Compromise” of the 1787 US Constitutional Convention, which declared that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual for the purposes of determining congressional representation.

Memory

its most expansive form is what keeps social movements alive – helping us envisage more just alternatives for our collective future. I was taught that revolution needs design, poetry, music, jazz and funk. And in a world full of smoke and mirrors, art is often the most honest representational form. In this way, I see my evolving work as a writer, educator and cultural strategist as being in service of a creative and intellectual unfolding that is informed by the wisdom of the ancestors. In fact, I believe that they guided me to this moment.

Stephen and Malika are my friends, but I also see them as co-conspirators, designers and worldmakers who sit at this threshold between the sentient and profane. I still remember the first day I visited their Brooklyn studio. Maybe it’s because I had just finished reading Jacob Olupona’s article ‘Rethinking the Study of African Indigenous Religions’ on the way to our meeting, but when I walked into their workspace, I became perfectly overwhelmed by the sense of spirit that wafted throughout the room. Traditional west African masks hung next to texturally distinct versions of open-faced spirit-houses, which sat on industrial shelving alongside early 3D renderings of what would become Stephen Burks: Shelter in Place, their expansive solo exhibition that debuted at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in 2022. These modern altars, from a woven floor lantern to a wall-mounted display shelf, a partitioned coffee table to an ambiguous wooden container, reflect a critical expansion of traditional altar use through a new craft-oriented typology.

I guess I didn’t expect an industrial design studio to be so preoccupied by ancestors and the intangible.

Lights, tables, chairs and mirrors are functional. And yes, they tell stories and hold meaning, but by and large they are ubiquitously legible. Yet what I have come to understand is that Stephen Burks Man Made is, among many things, helping to give shape to that which is infinite.

Since our first meeting, Stephen, Malika and I have shared a variety of discussions and writing exercises that seek to explore the essence of spirit and venerative practice within the context of contemporary design.

Sometime last year, we all sat under the Manhattan Bridge along the DUMBO waterway over bento boxes with the subway rattling above. It was New York at its finest. During our conversation, they broached the idea of AI as its own “divine” interpretative tool: a technology helping to shape representations of ancestors both known and unknown into physical form

through an unfolding process that pairs “the hand and the machine”. Through their use of a simple AI script, they combined visual inputs of early Ancestors prototypes with images of historical figures, including Malcolm X and bell hooks, to create abstract figurative sketches that served as creative and spiritual guides in their physical design process. I was intrigued yet also hesitant.

Just two months earlier, hundreds of leaders across the tech industry had signed an open letter calling for a moratorium to be placed upon AI lab developments.

The rate at which AI was (and still continues to be) advancing confirmed my own long-held foreboding about unchecked technological advance. I remember spiralling in bed after reading the letter, crying over my iPhone 13 about the prospect of being taken out by machines and the rapacious greed of 27-year-old white Silicon Valley tech bros. My somewhat luddite tendencies, paired with my ethical aversion to corporate conglomerates and big tech as an arm of empire created an immediate tension around the idea of AI having anything to do with the purity of ancestral cosmologies.

If I’m totally honest, the whole idea still feels slightly sickening to me. But increasingly, I have understood that this sort of technology will remain relevant in our lives, and that, as Black folks, we must be at the forefront of its use and implementation.

I credit this growth in thinking to the conversations I’ve had with Stephen and Malika about their interest in engaging AI in their exploration of Indigenous ancestral practices. Their approach to this framework places primacy on human-centred and emic knowledge, which necessitates the development of ethically situated relationships, and community and diverse spiritual practices as central to art and design. I also owe this evolution to my 19-year-old political science students at the Macaulay Honors College in New York, who have creatively (and sometimes lazily) engaged ChatGPT and Midjourney in their work. Collectively, we’ve decided there’s no escaping this reality, and that it is up to us to shape our use of these tools in an epistemically decolonial manner.

Over the course of the past few years, I have watched Stephen and Malika use AI as a way to explore themes of ancestrality in their work. Most specifically, their series The Ancestors, which initially began as one of five commissioned speculative prototypes by the High Museum, has expanded into a collection of monumental and figurative objects inviting us to consider our lineage 102

Ceramic extrusions from Ancestors (Shield), laid out to reveal the cabinet’s abstracted figure.

Memory

and kinship ties across time and space. This ongoing body of work has opened up the studio’s practice to new creative expressions, in which a deeper spiritual impetus seems to be leading the way. And over the last two years of investigation, these original gestures have taken on new shape and materiality with the introduction of clay.

The studio’s first Ancestor, Ancestors (Guardian), debuted early this year in the winter 2024 show The New Transcendence at Friedman Benda Gallery in New York City. This group show, curated by Glenn Adamson, explored the place of spirituality in contemporary design, uncovering how the field might become a vehicle for personal or societal transcendence. Made of doublewalled corten steel adorned with glazed stoneware tiles, Ancestors (Guardian) serves as a functional sculpture, with hidden shelving peppering its beautifully statuesque figure. At 6ft tall, the piece offers an emergent material language for the ephemerality of self-transcendence within Black life and social movements across the United States. The literal and metaphorical monumentality of this piece beckons viewers into its sphere, affirming the grandeur of the ancestors as a force that is worthy of contemplative honour.

At the University of Arkansas, new ancestors are now emerging. Ancestors (Shield), Ancestors (Half A Man), and Ancestors (Shadow) represent a search for ancient epistemologies in our modern world. Through these works, the studio is actively helping to usher in a reconfiguration of primordial practices into our everyday lives through a range of objects, from functional furniture to more conceptual and abstract figurative forms.

Objects like Ancestors (Shield) seek to define and protect sacred space. Once completed, this cabinet will stand at a towering 7ft tall, composed of more than 20 handmade polychromatic ceramic doors. The arresting exterior of doors is formed from clay tubes, which are split lengthwise then joined to create a ribbed surface. The robust interior shelf structure, meanwhile, will be made of solid hardwood (red oak or padouk) with the final addition of industrial rubber sheets to enclose the form. While shields are associated with war and violence, this new Ancestor poses an alternative challenge of how we can protect ourselves, and our communities, from a hostile world while also reflecting back the beauty of it. By extension, Ancestors (Shield) contemplates how design can serve as a kind of spiritual armour. In this way, The Ancestors has become its own ethical intervention, expanding our daily practices and

sense of home as a space to commune, honour and love in ways that affirm our intrinsic interdependence with the world around us through functional, domestic objects. In turning toward and honouring spirit-based cosmologies, the studio is creating a new design lexicon and physicality through which we may engage the wisdom of our forebears and honour the lives of our loved ones.

To me, there is nothing more powerful, more pure, or beautiful than connecting with my ancestors. I think about their complex lives, often marked by war and displacement. I think about their brilliance, beauty and many accomplishments. I think about what they might have dreamed for themselves and the ways that the world remained rigid, not often bending in their favour. I think about my life as an extension of their own, and believe that our ancestors live on through us all, and that, in the purest sense, our lives are a reflection of their will.

I imagine their dreams had something to do with our collective freedom and wholeness. I imagine their dreams included trees growing unfettered and fish repopulating fresh waters. But instead, we remain in turmoil and existential malaise. I suspect we always will do as long as the project of settler colonialism continues, and that the ancestors will remain uneasy.

Yet it is through their infinite wisdom, as humans turned to boundless spirit, that I believe we can find freedom, clarity and creative joy. Stephen and Malika’s exploration of the ancestors through their practice has brought forth new possibilities for more life, and a capaciousness that feels imperative against the limitations of our vision of the Anthropocene.

To do the bidding of our righteous ancestors is to expand the depths of our collective humanity, and may we shift into “right relationship” with ourselves and this world by doing so. These beautifully composed designed objects have become an invocation of ancestors known and unknown, whose wisdom and spirit serve as a guiding force. E N D Najha Zigbi-Johnson is a writer and educator exploring the intersections of Black space making, social movements, and contemporary art.

Brandon Forrest Frederick is an artist and educator currently living in Northwest Arkansas.

104

Factory Diaries Introduction Albie Fay Words Anna Holmquist Photographs Magnus Laupa

106

“We see a potential for design to create a narrative that visualises the production process and material,” writes designer Anna Holmquist in her 2023 PhD thesis ProduktionsNoveller, newly published by Konst/ig Books. “This points towards a new designer role inspired by craft – a designer working close to production to highlight old manufacturing techniques and make the industrial heritage visible.”

For the past 20 years Holmquist and her design partner Chandra Ahlsell, who together founded the Stockholmbased design practice Folkform in 2005, have been experimenting with Masonite. Invented in America in 1924, and soon highly popular in Sweden, Masonite is a hardwood material formed from a sawdust and wood fibre pulp that is subjected to intense steam and heat, before being compressed and formed into final shape as a board.

“The areas of use for the material seemed limitless during [the early 20th century],” Holmquist explains. “[The] wooden hardboard was used [for] everything from building temporary pavilions and kiosks to more permanent buildings such as garages and a surface material in interiors, especially kitchens.[…] In Sweden, Masonite was used as insulation panels during the winter and for small cabins where the family could spend their holiday during summer. The Masonite hardboard was part of the construction of the Swedish Welfare State and became a symbol of the period’s belief in the future.”

By the second half of the 20th century, however, Masonite’s status had fallen, with the material no longer carrying the sense of progressiveness that it once did. Today, Masonite is mostly used as a cheap construction material for theatre sets, skateboard ramps, and artists’ canvases, yet Folkform saw potential in the material and its past. Beginning in 2004, they began regularly visiting Sweden’s first Masonite factory in Rundvik, a town in Västerbotten County, northern Sweden, with which they had been invited to collaborate.

“How could we renew this material, which had been forgotten since the 1950s,” Holmquist writes, “and make people look at it with new eyes?”

In part, the studio sought to use Masonite as a vehicle to explore the collective amnesia surrounding industrial processes that has grown up in the Global North. “In a time where many of the products we consume are imported from countries where labour is cheap and production is anonymous and impossible

for the consumer to trace,” writes Holmquist, “the sincere and transparent story of a product’s origins is more important than ever.” As part of this, they began to reinterpret the material and its production through new design techniques, creating experimental Masonite cabinets and drawers, embedded with pressed flowers and butterflies.

The factory in Rundvik closed in 2011, the last of Sweden’s Masonite factories to do so, and its machinery has since been transported to manufacturers in Thailand.

Yet throughout the factory’s last years, and even after its closure, Holmquist and Ahlsell repeatedly visited the facility, with Holmquist documenting all their experiences in ProduktionsNoveller. Throughout this process, their work has been guided by the ideas of philosopher Vilém Flusser, whose 1991 essay ‘The Factory’ argued that “anybody who wants to know about our past should concentrate on excavating the ruins of factories. Anybody who wants to know about our present should concentrate on examining present-day factories critically. And anybody who addresses the issue of our future should raise the question of the factory of the future.”

In what follows, Disegno presents a curated timeline of Folkform’s journey through the Rundvik factory, drawn from excerpts in ProduktionsNoveller. From the studio’s arrival in the factory in 2004, to its return in 2019 when it was already desolate, Holmquist’s memories reveal both Masonite’s manufacturing process and the human stories behind the material. To immerse oneself in these fragmentary memories is to step into Folkform’s practice: to experience the rhythm of the humming steam press, the scent of raw materials, and the connections forged between designer and production method. These are paired with imagery from photographer Magnus Laupa, which is rich with nostalgia. To critic and writer John Berger, “the thrill found in a photograph comes from the onrush of memory,” which is exactly how Holmquist utilises Laupa’s imagery. “I use images to remember,” she explains, “to notice the details, and to communicate with other readers and practitioners.”

Albie Fay is a writer and photographer from London.

Memory

2005 The first time we visited the factory in Rundvik was an early winter morning in 2005, when Jan Persson, the head of the factory’s laboratory, collected us from the airport. After what seemed like an eternity in his blue Volvo on a country road lined with dark forests, we drew closer to the factory. We were completely taken aback – it felt as if time had stood still since it was built in 1929.

Steaming wood pulp filled the space with its odour, while the loud noise of the machines was persistent, almost frightening. The heat was overwhelming. Jan showed us the large steam press that compressed the Masonite. He showed us the machine hall, where hundreds of gears and engine parts lay spread across the floor. We said a quick hello to the factory employees, who were sat in a circle having their coffee break.

That first visit to the factory made a deep impact on us. We realised that this was a unique opportunity

and that we were about to work with a material that represented a living story of the 20th century. This project would be an experiment in design process just as much as in material innovation.

2005 We proposed to change the surface of the material by blending it with new organic materials, such as flowers, embedding them within the wood pulp. Our aim was to challenge the composition of the Masonite and change its surface to give this humble material a completely new expression.

By changing the surface we attempted to make this everyday, often hidden, material more visible – to give these boards new life and meaning. During the 1930s, just after Masonite was invented, there had been different board patterns and reliefs, but none are still in production today. The idea to add flowers to create natural ornament was completely new.

108

2005 Our initial experiments were conducted at night, whilst the production line was not running. Jan carried out all of these first tests with rose petals in secret and it turned out that our idea worked. The colour of the roses, however, disappeared and we ended up with an effect that looked like wilted leaves.

We climbed up the side of the production line where the Masonite hardboards were manufactured and began to scatter flowers to form the patterns that we wanted. We had three minutes at our disposal – regular production had needed to come to a halt on behalf of our flower experiments. With fear-tinged delight, we found ourselves in the middle of mass production – in the heat, the rumbling noise, and the humidity from the press.

thin butterfly wings became one with the raw surface of the material. The expression of the traditional material was imbued with new meaning before being placed in the steam press.

2005 The 32 dead butterflies were slowly merging with the hardboard in the press. The patterns of the

2011 When the factory was still operational it was surrounded by 10m-high mountains of woodchips from

2005 We received so many requests that we had to stop buying flowers in Stockholm and instead initiate collaborations with various gardens in Västerbotten.

They could deliver sacks full of herbs directly to the factory so that we could make our hardboards on a larger scale. When the first sack of thyme arrived early one spring morning, the staff at the factory entrance thought that the delivery had ended up in the wrong place. They ardently argued, “This is a Masonite factory, not a restaurant.”

Memory

the surrounding sawmills: the waste that the boards were made of. This cheap, local raw material from the great forests of Norrland was the fundamental element in the manufacturing of Masonite hardboard.

bankruptcy trustee and he opened the gate to let us in.

It echoed in the now quiet industrial premises as we walked around. We were both sad and curious, devoutly moving between the halls.

Among abandoned tools and leftover machine parts lie bulging remnants of Masonite. We were still surrounded by the brick shell that once contained a lively production. The ceiling was high and the morning sun shone through large dusty windows. The dismantled machines had left jagged edges in the building. We passed the place where the huge, haunting Masonite press had once been placed. Now there was a square void several meters high, which cut through the room in several planes.

2011 It has now been nearly seven years since we laid down the first flowers. In May, the whole factory will be transported to Thailand. The Norwegian owners have sold the wood processing to Metroply in Thailand and the machines from Rundvik are to be reassembled at a new facility near the Cambodian border. In Thailand, Nordic pine will be replaced with eucalyptus as the chosen raw material.

2019 Jan welcomed us with a smile. He still lived in Rundvik, even though the factory had closed. Now he worked as a consultant with his own company. Jan had been allowed to borrow the factory’s key from the

2019 It was the compact silence that made the biggest impression on us. The rumbling machines had fallen silent. The steam that had previously filled the room 110

had been replaced by dry, dusty air. Maybe it was our imagination, but we could sometimes smell a faint scent of Masonite.

2019 Nils-Olof Engstrom, a former mechanic in the factory, had a dark blue work jacket and was by himself when he met us at the factory on that warm June day in 2019. When he took the jacket off, his fair skin and muscular arms became visible. He seemed a little uncomfortable at first, but then extended his upper arm and showed us a large tattoo representing the Masonite logo, or “Masonite Guy” as it was called by most of the factory.

He walked into one of the smaller rooms in the factory and we followed him in. There, deep inside, something green loomed in the middle of all the grey.

It was a fragile fern that had started to grow in one corner. Nature had slowly begun to re-enter the site.

Nils-Olof still lived near the factory, as did most of the others who had worked here. He was the fourth generation to have worked at the Masonite factory, which his great-grandfather and grandfather had helped build over 100 years ago. As a child, he had accompanied his grandfather and, even then, Nils-Olof knew that he wanted to work here. “It was my dream job,” he told us.

2019 We spent the night in Rundvik. Jan and his wife had invited us to dinner, and we slept in their guest room on the top floor of the house. The next day we left Rundvik, the factory and its chip piles. Perhaps for the last time? E N D Anna Holmquist is an artist and writer, and one of the founders of the Stockholm-based design studio Folkform.

Magnus Laupa is a photojournalist based in Stockholm.

Memory

From the Ground Up Words Kitya Mark Photographs Mathijs Labadie

Christien Meindertsma and Dzek’s Flaxwood installation at Milan Design Week 2024, designed by Arquitectura-G (image: Federico Ciamei).

112

To hold linoleum in your hands: 1) collect linseed oil from flax seeds; 2) dry the oil and mix with plant resin to create lino cement; 3) add wood dust and chalk; 4) heat and knead the cement into dough; 5) press the dough using a roller machine.

A version of these instructions is printed on a label at the V&A in London, accompanying the third iteration of the museum’s annual Make Good: Rethinking Material Futures exhibition. Above the label sits a catalogue of tiles and blocks – samples of discarded and re-moulded linoleum flooring that form part of designer Christien Meindertsma’s research into the overlooked potential of the material. “Linoleum is really exciting to experiment with because it’s so pliable,” Meindertsma later tells me in a video call from the Netherlands. “When I’m in the factory I breathe in linoleum’s distinct smell and I’m reminded of this material’s endless shapes and possibilities.”

A typical sheet of linoleum has a smooth and supple surface, backed by rough jute. It’s made to be laid on the ground, and underfoot it feels cushioning and springy, as though if you tripped and fell, you’d be guaranteed a soft landing. The smell, meanwhile, is faintly earthy, like sawdust or damp pine. Inhale deeply. It’s the sort of smell that stays with you, lodged in your memory.

Linoleum is made from solidified linseed oil, which was first patented in the 1860s as a hygienic floor covering and quickly became popular across Britain and beyond. The English manufacturer and inventor Frederick Walton noticed a pale skin forming over oxidised linseed oil and named his new material after the Latin for flax (“linum”) and oil (“oleum”).

“Linoleum could be laid over a dirt floor in a fisherman’s cottage or over expensive marble in an under-inhabited palace to keep out the cold,” explains Lily Barnes, curator of a new exhibition about the material at Kirkcaldy Galleries, a cultural space based in the Scottish town of Kirkcaldy. By the early 20th century, Kirkcaldy had become the global centre for linoleum production, flooring the world with a material that was easy to clean, water-resistant, draught-proof and affordable.

“Many upper-class families would also use it to cover wood and stone floors to protect them when they weren’t entertaining guests,” Barnes adds. For a while, linoleum was an unexpected junction between different classes and geographies – like the seam between tiles laid side-by-side.

With this in mind, I take my granny to the V&A, wanting to know what – if anything – linoleum means to her. Together, we peer through protective glass at Meindertsma’s lino samples. In recent years the designer has bought an entire plot of flax harvest from a farmer in the Dutch Flevopolder, setting a series of projects in motion in which she explores new futures for linoleum. Renoleum, a product made from recycled waste linoleum, is what’s currently being shown at the V&A, but this year Meindertsma also debuted Flaxwood, an architectural tile produced in collaboration with materials company Dzek, using a simplified linoleum recipe. “There is so much life in linoleum’s past and future forms,” she says when we speak over Zoom about the projects. “I’m interested in the route this material has gone through, the interactions it has had, and where it will go next.”

I lean in close to try and catch the smell, but a security guard pulls me up short. His co-worker visibly sniffs it, however, his nose and lanyard hitting against the Perspex. On our way home from the museum my granny recalls the brown linoleum floors in the house that my grandpa grew up in – the same house she moved into aged 21, and where my mom was later born. That brown linoleum could be considered an ancestor of Flaxwood and Renoleum; a material lineage unfolding through flooring. “I see products – and everything that surrounds us – as existing in a phase, in a temporary shape,” Meindertsma reflected in her catalogue for Dzek’s 2024 presentation of Flaxwood at Milan Design Week. “Matter is in transition, and we are all connected by this transition.”

One reason for linoleum’s early success was that the material lent itself towards different design treatments: a single pigment added to the manufacturing process could produce an inexpensive block colour, or, for a more extravagant design, eight colours could be swirled into an intricate pattern. Over time, manufacturers became adept at mimicking other materials and, like a mirage, squares of linoleum took on the appearance of porcelain or polished parquet. To achieve geometric parquet, for instance, factory workers would slice printed linoleum and fit the pieces together mosaic-style. The result was visual replicas of cold, hard floors that felt unexpectedly warm and soft to the touch. Linoleum fulfilled domestic space dreams – families who could never afford stone flooring suddenly had the option to roll out sheets of imitation Italian marble.

Memory

Above left: flax.

Above right: linseed oil.

Right: a linoleum puzzle made using blocks and tiles cut by woodworkers Kuperus & Gardenier.

Next page (left): wood granulate.

Next page (right): linoleum cement, a thickened linseed oil with a consistency like Turkish delight.

114

Linoleum samples from Dzek’s Milan presentation about Flaxwood (image: Federico Ciamei).

Memory

Voicenoting me during my lunch break at work, my mom describes how, when she first moved to the UK, she lived in a house with a cold, dark kitchen and a window that looked onto a wall. She wanted to let the light in, so she bought linoleum. Rolls of canary yellow from the local hardware store that she cut and stuck.

I imagine my mom with scissors in her hands, kneeling on the floor, measuring out sheets of sunshine five years before I was born. Lino for her was a household name, synonymous with vibrant, insulating, costeffective flooring.

My mom, however, was late to linoleum. In the aftermath of the 1960s plastics boom, lino was largely superseded by vinyl: a lower-maintenance, petroleumbased alternative. Even the names we called these two floorings became interchangeable. In her book Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (2011), science writer Susan Freinkel recounts that, across the board, “plastics challenged traditional materials and won: taking the place of steel in cars, glass in packaging” – and the linoleum from under our feet. Polyvinyl chloride, otherwise known as vinyl, was versatile, new and highly desirable. It had all the design potential of lino, but could be bought at an even cheaper price. Unlike linoleum, vinyl was also fully waterproof and easier to mop shiny, squeaky clean.

Our old floors became something that needed ripping up and replacing. In the landfills they biodegraded, smeared with epithets: outdated, old-fashioned, obsolete, tacky, tatty, dull, grimy, greasy, kitsch.

Yet, as Freinkel’s book title highlights, plastics’ success is toxic. While linoleum is made from natural materials and biodegrades, vinyl is widely considered to be the most environmentally damaging plastic currently manufactured. According to Greenpeace, vinyl’s production, use, and disposal releases chlorinebased chemicals that amass in fatty tissues and cells, increasing the risk of cancer, infertility and impaired childhood development. Many of the factories that now export vinyl across the world are located in poor and racialised communities. Existing American vinyl plants, for instance, are primarily concentrated in states with the highest poverty rates, such as Louisiana, Kentucky and Mississippi. These factory workers and their environments are disproportionately contaminated.

The shine and squeak of vinyl comes with unjustifiable human and environmental costs.

I want to reach out and shake us all: remember a time before all this? When our homes and public spaces felt and smelled like homes and public spaces, not

polyvinyl chloride? For me, linoleum was a checkerboard canteen floor. Friday lunchtime at school, carrying heaped fish and chips on a plastic tray. Sitting at the same table each week, dolloping red ketchup on greasy plates, laughing (about something or nothing) before lessons began again. At the end of the week, I still find myself looking for that smell – cooking oil and malt vinegar mixed with the sawdust of linoleum. Deepfried memories stored away, layered into smell, taste, material. Linoleum is a particularly apt material for such sedimentation: smells sink into it, dents and scuffs accumulate on its supple surface. This process of mark-making is a log of time inhabited in space; such floors are unintentional archives, keeping the leftovers of everyday life – the antithesis of plastic vinyl, which memories can’t stick to, and smells only of lingering chemicals.

“To make Flaxwood,” Meindertsma tells me, “we had to change linoleum’s production method, but the original smell stays the same, because we use the same natural ingredients.” To gain a more sensory understanding of this biogenic product, I visit Dzek, the company that is working with Meindertsma. Sitting in its studio just off Camden Road, in north London, I hold a sample of Flaxwood to my nose. Meindertsma was right. Warm and sawdusty; the perfume of oxidised linseed oil.

“We wanted to make a tile because it’s an object that you can actually hold in your hand,” explains Brent Dzekciorius, director of Dzek. “You can relate to it on a human scale. Unlike a giant roll of vinyl, this is something you can really touch.” The Flaxwood tile in my palm has no added pigment, and is the colour of sunbaked soil. It looks, smells and feels like the natural elements it derives from – very different to linoleum’s chameleon reputation of copying the appearance of other materials.

As Meindertsma put it to me: “We want Flaxwood to be celebrated for its actual living ingredients, not to try and look like something else.” In this spirit, she and Dzekciorius are aiming for their product to be fully traceable and non-extractive: it will use chalk dust drawn from the waste streams of water treatment plants instead of using mined chalk; wood dust taken from the surplus of that used in stable bedding; linseed oil harvested from local Dutch flax. I run my finger along the sample’s gentle grain, inhaling its aroma. In my mind I am back at school again.

I wonder how many people would still recognise linoleum’s distinctive smell – how many of us were 116

A linoleum house, made using tiles cut by Kuperus & Gardenier.

Memory

A mountain of sawdust.

118

raised in proximity to it. Over supermarket sandwiches, my colleague tells me about Machine Ball, a game he played as a child which involved kicking a football into a washing machine. “Bam! Goal!” he exclaims, arms spread wide like Tony Adams. All of a sudden he is 12 years old in the kitchen, slipping over the linoleum floor, tackling his friends until something or someone cracks. Did he keep tally of the goals he scored each week after school, jotting them down in the back of an exercise book? He doesn’t remember.

Only the long scratch in the lino when he scored with studs on. A dirty challenge.

Machine Ball is a limited archive – a singular memory stored in a few metres of linoleum. Yet still, what if all our childhood linoleum floors were prised-up and glued together in one long, unending roll? I’m reminded of Meindertsma’s Renoleum project, how she collects second-hand linoleum scraps like artefacts. In her glass case at the V&A are heterogenous memories cached across a common material; a depth of unexpected and incalculable connectedness.

My colleague still lives in his family home, but the floor has changed. The fridge, the washing machine and the cream counters now sit on a plastic sheet of vinyl. The new flooring looks like his old flooring – it’s even a similar colour – but without that stud scratch in the corner of the room. He tells me he used to navigate his way around the kitchen in the dead of night just by feeling that scratch and the bumps and the parts of the floor where the edges curled up. If he slidetackled now, would it leave any mark on this fresh, plasticky floor?

It’s a question Meindertsma cares about. Flaxwood deliberately imprints easily, and is even more malleable than traditional linoleum. “Flaxwood is a soft material and I think it would be nice if it retained its softness, because it makes our rooms softer if our floors are soft,” she tells me. “Maybe it’s not as resilient as other materials we are more used to, but I think that can be OK. The dents it will get over time, they will be part of its story.” I envision my colleague in his kitchen with future generations: a small leg extends and an even smaller foot with a boot laced-up tight goes in for the sliding challenge.

Can memories be re-fabricated? When linoleum is ripped up, what happens to the stories it stores?

To produce Renoleum, Meindertsma experiments with rolling old lino flooring through a plying machine. Her photographs of the process show diptychs of faded

offscourings next to pristine block tiles – the final product is both an archive of the past and a material for the future. “If I gave someone this new sample they would feel the old linoleum in it, even if they did not know it was there,” she tells me. I sense that her use of “feel” here has two meanings: feeling the texture of the old linoleum stratified into the new linoleum, and feeling the affective memories carried forward in those layers, too.

Type “where to buy linoleum” into Google today, and every search result will show vinyl. Google results like these suggest a deep and enduring relationship with vinyl, as though alternative materials never existed and never could exist. Projects such as Flaxwood and Renoleum, however, prove otherwise. One vision for Flaxwood is that, at the end of a tile’s life in a home or public space, it will be gently prised-up and returned to the plying machine, to be transformed into something else for someone else. Flaxwood tiles will accumulate lives like the layers in sedimentary rock: sunshine floors; fish and chips; football kicks; and on and on and on. E N D Kitya Mark is an interdisciplinary writer and facilitator living in London.

Mathijs Labadie is a photographer who specialises in still-life and design photography.

Memory

Give Us This Day Our Daily Watts Words Oli Stratford Photographs Kane Hulse

The Powerbox battery for Herman Miller, designed by Industrial Facility.

120

“She started up just fine this morning. This afternoon... clunk.”

That’s 1967 ad copy, by the way, in case the pronoun didn’t give it away. It’s the first sentence of a thick block of marketing text about lead-acid car batteries, printed beneath a black and white aerial shot of an American football stadium. A game has let out earlier in the day and the stadium is long since silent. “If only you’d known,” the advert continues. “A dying battery can tell you when it’s about to give up the ghost, but you have to pay attention.” Just visible alongside the stadium’s long, late-afternoon shadow, a single car remains stationary in the car park. “Now,” the headline asks, “don’t you wish you had the DieHard?”

Prior to researching this essay, I didn’t know that DieHard was a brand of batteries, which is a gap in my knowledge I’m happy to have addressed. Personally, I think that “DieHard” is an excellent name for a battery, primarily because it makes me think of Alan Rickman doing a German accent. But even if DieHard doesn’t have that association for you, it’s still a good name.

When the batteries launched in 1967, for example, advertising agency J. Walter Thompson ran a consumer survey and results were favourable. People liked “DieHard’s” connotations of durability and longevity, even if they weren’t too fussed about the specifics.

“I can’t say too much about the battery in my car,” one respondent explained. “Mostly, I take it for granted.”

Well, I can’t blame them, because taking energy for granted is one of the predominant social attitudes of the 20th and 21st centuries, at least in the Global North. “As the availability and reliability of energy improved, attention to it diminished,” writes historian James Morton Turner in his 2022 book Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. In many countries, we’re lucky enough to not have to think about our energy supply on a day-to-day basis because it’s just sort of there – electricity comes out the wall, yo! “This is one of the defining qualities of modernity,” Turner notes, “the intensification and the abstraction of energy consumption.” In 2021, for example, the world is supposed to have produced a grand total of 14,800 MToe of energy, but I must confess that I don’t know what a MToe is, let alone how you’d make one. Cut it off a MFt? Within this sea of abstraction, batteries introduce another level of distance. Writing in the preface to Charged, historian Paul S. Sutter explains how batteries

“provide energy that is cordless, reliable and portable”, serving as our best reserve of storable electricity and powering much of the tech that we surround ourselves with. But batteries are also a reserve whose physical form frequently feels divorced from the actual production of energy. Contemporary batteries are designed around convenience, taking shape as mute canisters, flat packets and sealed containers that are squirrelled away inside products – physically, they are what Sutter terms “a persistent black box that we take for granted without understanding their inner workings”. Looking at one, you’re unlikely to think about cathodes and anodes, or the electrolyte that enables their energising flow of electrons (unless you really like batteries). Which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except for the fact that we now live in a time when using “[energy] sustainably and efficiently”, in the words of Mateo Kries, director of the Vitra Design Museum, “is crucial for our future on planet Earth”.1 Across the board, societies are increasingly aware of the need to reduce energy consumption, yet the sheer convenience of contemporary batteries makes it easy to forget this on a personal level. They’re a portable archive of chemical energy, but one whose form betrays no sense of the physical processes generating said energy. After all, energy released anywhere is a trace of a physical event: of coal burning, atoms splitting, turbines turning. Batteries are charged with the energy released by these processes or else, in the case of non-rechargeables, release the energy inherent to their own material assembly and makeup. Hence why I mostly take them for granted. It’s all hidden away inside! I’m typing this essay on my laptop, for instance, and I haven’t given a moment’s thought to its internal battery: it’s keeping my laptop in power; it’s keeping me in prose. That’s as far as our relationship goes.

Growing up, I might have been able to tell you more. Ahead of long, trans-European car trips with my family, I would calculate the exact number of AA batteries needed to power my Game Boy Color for the full duration of the journey. This was vital, because I loved my Game Boy Color as if it were family, and I didn’t love my actual family enough to want to speak to them for even a single minute. I packed power carefully, stocking my backpack in perfect correlation with my consumption. “While disposable batteries 1 This quote is taken from Kries’s foreword to the museum’s 2024 exhibition and book Transform! Designing the Future of Energy.

Memory

have always delivered a vanishingly small amount of electricity,” Turner writes, “they have played a pivotal, but little-appreciated, role in enabling a modern culture of mobility.” At 10 years old, I could not have agreed more.2 I measured out my life in AA batteries, even if the individual batteries themselves were of little consequence. Duracell, Energizer, Panasonic – whatever. To me, they were all just parcelled-up portions of game time: chemical permission to Mario.

Some 25 years on, I rarely use disposable batteries; my current roster of devices all have rechargeable lithium-ion ones instead. Today, I measure out my life in battery, singular: when a device flatlines, I plug it in – which is a considerable development in the history of product design. “Batteries are now sealed into products,” designer Leo Leitner tells me, moving around the desks and shelves of a third-floor studio space in Clerkenwell, London, busy seeking out packing materials. Leitner is the creative director of Future Facility, the technology-focused research wing of design studio Industrial Facility, which was founded

by Sam Hecht and Kim Colin back in 2002.3 It’s kind of Leitner to meet me: he’s struggling with a summer cold, but Hecht and Colin are out of the country with work, so he’s volunteered to come in to lend me a design they’ve been working on. “A product’s lifespan is now often determined by the lifespan of its battery,” he continues, taping up a cardboard box he’s picked out, “but tying a battery to a product, and determining the lifetime of products based off a battery is really, really bad.” He passes me the sealed box. “This, in a weird way, takes the two apart again.”

Ahead of meeting Leitner, I had let my laptop battery drain to zero, because if we were going to separate batteries and the products they power, I wanted to do things properly. Which is why I’ve also come to Waterlow Park in north London – no charge points in sight. It’s already bright and sticky-hot, with afternoon sunbathers brown and sweat-glossed, and tennis balls clocking back and forth across baked clay courts. But some of us have work to do, so Waterlow is going to be my office for the day. I start peeling the tape off the box, because if batteries enable a modern culture of mobility, then I’ve mobilised myself to have a lovely day in the park. In that vein, I’m now typing live from courtside,

which is a luxury afforded by the black plastic device sitting next to me on the grass.

“OK, so let’s set the scene,” Hecht told me a week or so previously, when he, Colin and Leitner had first invited me to their studio. “What is Powerbox?” Most straightforwardly, Powerbox is a portable battery that provides sufficient energy to cover a day’s work for a single person, but that’s probably the boring answer.

Instead, Industrial Facility tell me, you could frame Powerbox as being a solution to a problem surrounding power infrastructure. “Nomadic technology has allowed for nomadic work,” Colin explains, “which is the most important thing to solve [for design].” While many people can now work from anywhere, she continues, they’re constrained by the availability of power to enable that. This, she adds, is a concern for Herman Miller, the venerable US furniture design company, and a long-term collaborator of Industrial Facility.

“The promise of agility is that I can work anywhere,” Hecht continues. “If I’ve got wireless wifi, then I’ll need wireless power, and for the last 10 years, we’ve been talking about that with Herman Miller. The constant answer we both gave is, ‘Well, eventually [the tech companies] are going to sort it out.’”

The problem, Hecht argues, is that said companies have not sorted it out: nomadic work remains dependent upon traditional power infrastructure, which is often limited, and various proposed fixes that have been considered to resolve this issue have not been properly thought through. Designing power-points into furniture, for instance, is a nonstarter, Colin explains, given that “technology changes way more than a chair needs to change, so the two cycles aren’t compatible,” while hardwiring additional infrastructure within a space is expensive and permanent, flying in the face of the flexibility that contemporary work professes to value.

“Infrastructure is set,” Leitner notes, “whereas usage of a space evolves over time.” With this in mind, the team opted to explore batteries. “Herman Miller took the decision that because nobody else is doing this holistically,” Hecht explains, “then, well, screw it: we’ll just do it ourselves.”

My loaned Powerbox is starting to attract glances from fellow park users, which probably isn’t surprising.

After all, I’m carrying a laptop wired up to what looks like a car battery, albeit one that has been stripped of the garish brand labels normally plastered across them. The Powerbox has been designed to play upon

2 That’s probably a bit disingenuous, because no 10-year-old cares about a book subtitled “A History of Batteries”.

3 Or, as the excellent plaque next to their front door has it: “Industrial Facility: Est. a while ago”.

122

Memory

Powerboxes in Industrial Facility’s studio.

Sam Hecht, Kim Colin and Leo Leitner.

124

The Powertray and Powerboxes (image: Fabian Frinzel).

Memory

memories of more familiar, bulky battery packs from the past – an all-black form that is recognisable to many, but anonymous in its detailing. Its main body is roughly the size and shape of a house brick, with its plastic curving up and around to form a thick handle embedded with multiple USB-C slots. There’s capacity to charge laptops, phones, tablets and pretty much anything else you might need, as well as a chunky On button to start the power flowing. That’s more or less it: it looks like a battery and it performs like one too, which is, of course, the point. “If we’re looking at something new, it needs to have some connection to our behaviour with that thing, our memory of that thing,” Colin tells me. “Recognisability ties into public memory,” Leitner adds. “What does an object do when I’ve never used it before? In the case of Powerbox, we tried to solve this through its form, which is making it recognisable as a battery.” But people are still staring at me because I’m sitting with a car battery peering at the tennis courts. It seems, somehow… unsavoury?

Part of the oddity of the situation may be that we’re no longer used to personal power infrastructure being anything other than discreet. “Batteries are relatively unique in their portability, storability, and ability to supply nearly instantaneous electricity on demand,” Turner writes, adding that they have in turn powered digital technologies that seem “ethereal, transcending the bounds of the physical world”. To enable this dematerialisation, the batteries themselves have needed to be intensely physical, however, having been forged throughout their history from ever more complex combinations of lead, sulphuric acid, mercury, manganese, zinc, steel, carbon, graphite, ammonium chloride, potassium hydroxide, cadmium, lithium, nickel or cobalt – they are, in this respect, what Sutter terms “of the earth[…] the stuff of mines and metallurgy and energy-intensive materials processing”. Batteries may be unobtrusive, but they’re also complex archives of elements carved out from rock and earth. “[Resource] omnivory has become characteristic of technological advance,” writes Turner. “The lowly beer can was once made of steel; now it is fabricated from three different aluminum alloys, each optimized for the body, top, or tab. A microprocessor relied on twelve elements in the 1980s; its elemental diversity exploded to more than sixty elements by the 2010s. Since 2000, the simple incandescent lightbulb has been replaced by far more efficient, but materially complex, LED bulbs.

The pattern holds in the case of batteries, too.”

You don’t normally think about this when a battery is sealed into a product because it’s just there, offering power on tap. With the Powerbox, however, it’s harder to get away from material realities. Industrial Facility’s design is offering me energy, but also feels physically substantial because the power it provides has a visible representation. It’s not as if everyone in Waterlow Park is suddenly aware of all the lithium and iron phosphate I’m packing, but it’s nevertheless unusual to be presented with a pleasingly chonky reminder of batteries’ physical existence, particularly when you’re trying to work on your backhand.

Admittedly, I’ve probably stretched Powerbox’s intended usage by coming here. The battery may be portable, but it’s still designed to be used within more traditional office spaces. It’s not a consumer product, Hecht notes, and its design “is not playing to consumer ideals”. While the battery is designed to provide what Hecht terms “personal power”, it’s also there to offer two additional things: “spatial power” and “facility visualisation”. The first of these is pretty straightforward: as opposed to going to the trouble of wiring a space, a company could electrify it by providing Powerboxes instead. “You could theoretically take over a warehouse with no power in it,” Hecht tells me. “You’re suddenly free from infrastructure, because you don’t actually need it.” All you need instead, he explains, is a single plug to charge the battery overnight or else to power the Powerbox’s docking station – dubbed a Powertray – which can charge up to four batteries at once.4 This, the team explains, is why the design of the battery is purposefully industrial. “We want this to not feel natural for you to carry home,” Leitner tells me, “because it’s not your device.” And yet, here I am. In the park. With my Powerbox.5 If that’s “spatial power”, then “facility visualisation” is a little more fiddly to explain. “Power is not really something visual,” Hecht tells me. “You can’t really see what people are using individually [or in different areas of a space], so I don’t know if our workshop, for example, is using a lot of power or not much.” To try and overcome this, Hecht explains, Powerboxes can be fitted with trackers, which report their power usage 4 The Powertray can also use the docked batteries as its own source of electricity, and through an inverter convert their DC power into AC for larger devices.

5 Begrudgingly, I did later return the battery to Industrial Facility.

If Herman Miller wanted to send me my own set of Powerboxes and a Powertray, however, I’m willing to commit to fully electrifying Waterlow Park by Christmas 2024.

126

Memory

back to a dedicated app. This system, which has been designed by Future Facility but not yet implemented

by Herman Miller, allows companies to trace which spaces need the most power in an organisation and reallocate resources accordingly. The battery itself provides a memory of its past usage, logging data with every charge. “In a way, you could use Powerbox as a device that tells you where you need power and money,” Leitner explains. “If you see that people have loved using these batteries in certain areas of a space, then you could just hardwire a few extra sockets there.”

Powerbox, Colin suggests, is a form of diffused power infrastructure. “When offices get designed, they get designed in a very lasting way that doesn’t deliver on the promise that you can work anywhere you want,” she tells me. “In a way, what we’re saying is that this small bit of technology starts to deliver on that promise.”

My laptop is now at 48 per cent power, for instance, and I’m enjoying myself. The sun is out, a schnauzer is paddling doggily through Waterlow’s slimy ponds, and a man who looks eerily like Björn Borg has lost heavily in the second set. I may be getting looks, but I’m also getting work done. Contrary to what the advert would have you believe, I don’t wish I had the DieHard, because the Powerbox is doing just fine. “We don’t want to give the impression that this is the solution,” Hecht says, “but what we are saying is that we suspect these sorts of things will be interesting in the future.

Let’s see what [people] do with it.”

Which is all well and good, but let me tell you what I really like about the Powerbox. I like that it makes me think about my electricity usage and that it gives me a set amount of power each day. I like going to work/ park, swinging my Powerbox like a lunchbox, safe in the knowledge that it’s carrying my daily load of watts.

For the first time in years, Powerbox has made me pay attention to my electricity consumption, to remember what went into its physical production, and how the traces of this subsequently reached my laptop as usable electricity. The production of electricity is physically substantive, and I like a battery whose presence reminds me of this, because perhaps power is something that should not be hidden away. This, of course, is not the purpose of the Powerbox, but it is a corollary.

“A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its tools as by the caloric content of its foods,” wrote philosopher Ivan Illich in his 1974 book Energy and Equity, “but it is much harder to confess

to a national overindulgence in wattage than to a sickening diet.”6 In something of this vein, I’m happy to say that Powerbox provided me with all the energy I needed, but nothing more. It started up just fine this morning, and then, when the day was done, when my work was done… clunk. E N D Oli Stratford is the editor-in-chief of Disegno.

Kane Hulse is a photographer raised in South London.

6 Illich argues that “high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu”, because “energy grows at the expense of equity”. Writing five years later, Illich would frame these concerns as part of a wider argument that “a technology incorporates the values of the society for which it was invented to such a degree that these values become dominant in every society which applies that technology.” I can’t say how he would feel about my laptop, but I suspect not favourably.

128