The Ethiopian designer and architectural researcher discusses the role of coral in her recent installation, “Material Witnesses and Narrating Lifeforms”. The project is inspired by the coral used as a construction material on the coast of East Africa and in the Gulf. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Mailee Evans.
For the final time this week, we head to Dubai to close this program's coverage of the city's recent design week.
As part of this year's edition, the Ethiopian designer and architectural researcher Miriam Halawi Abraham presented the installation material.
Witnesses and Narrating lifeforms.
This project was inspired by the coral stone used as a construction material on the East African coast and in the Gulf.
Nestled within a false coral stone wall, smaller coral replicas made from locally sourced beeswax and tulle melt under the harsh sunlight.
The project is also in keeping with Miriam's use of natural materials, which previously have included salt featured at the Sharjah Trionale.
Monocle's design editor Nick Moniz caught up with Miriam at the installation to discuss some of the challenges with working alongside a living, breathing material that may not behave as you expect, and to find out about this new strand of thinking in her practice.
This is like a new sort of line of inquiry and work where I'm thinking of researching what I consider living materials and living in the sense of breathing, like organic materials that are responsive to our presence, but also in the sense of mythical presence or mythical livingness that we, like, endow potency in these things, like salts and honey, and we endow things like healing in the idea of healing, the idea of ritual practice, and then the historical trade that connects different regions to these materials.
So originally my use of salt in Sharjah was to relate it through the Red Sea to Ethiopia, to Arab Eritrea.
And then in this case, I was really interested in coral stone, how it's used in the Gulf and areas of material scarcity.
When merchants settled and they couldn't find rocks, they dove for coral.
And now I'm realizing it's a much wider practice in the Swahili coast.
And when I last visited Eritrea, Mazawa in the port, that's when I was in 2018, when the border opened.
It's like the first time I saw it as like an adult.
So I was like, oh, okay.
Like, this is like a really interesting use of material, of a living material you have to kill in order to use, but you can no longer repair.
Because I'm always interested in this idea of, like, preservation, but also the act of repair in order to preserve a story.