What do blood, feces, and urine have to do with architecture? Everything, apparently. The body, food, and waste are part of an entangled system of intimacy and memory, of production and violence. They are part of everyday practices, mediated by our learnt behaviours and by the objects that give way to our desire to consume and entertain. For Shaakira Jassat, interior architect and founder of Studio Sway, even the most repulsive states and elusive memories are part of the act of creation. ‘How do we bring back things that we’ve forgotten, that we’ve overlooked?’ Shaakira asks.
She’s visited tea farms in Sri Lanka and slaughterhouses in the Netherlands; she’s conjured tableware that resurfaces the culinary landscapes of her childhood, and she’s donned a lab coat as she uses Sporosarcina pasteuriito turn beetroot and spinach into potentially usable materials. All of this is driven by an understanding that our everyday rituals are intimate forms of life: change their architecture, and you change the fabric of our ecosystem.
Intimate encounters
‘My father had this art of holding a tea saucer with one hand and just lifting it to his mouth to drink his tea. You could see the tea before you and smell it better this way, ensuring you get the full tea experience. He had to find ways to adapt his ritual to Western teaware, and I thought it was a really striking memory,’ says Shaakira. Unlike the individualist nature of Western eating patterns, Eastern cultures centre meals around community. ‘With us, it’s really an event. When I was young, we were like 10 people around the table every night,’ she explains. Uncovering these memories is as much a part of sustainability, recalling in to order to preserve.
Familiar Forms, one of her latest collections, features tableware inspired by her Indian heritage, South African identity, and migratory state as she now lives in the Netherlands. Holding this cup brings an intimate connection to the homeland: like damp sand, their colours speak and smell of the African landscape. Their shapes tell the stories of transition: using an extruder, the clay was forced through a shape and the protrusions altered by hand — all point to movement, to the oceanic journey Shaakira’s grandparents undertook from India to South Africa, adapting and morphing.
Glazing, a rather technical decision, is laden with implications. As it stands, the red soil cup allows your lips to touch the rough stone, raw and grainy earth. ‘When you pour water into it, the clay also changes and it reminds you of a South African riverbed,’ Shaakira explains. But Indian food can be oily, and without glazing it could become difficult to clean. After several studies, Shaakira chose to glaze only the inside of the plate, ensuring it is functional but that the textures of the African landscape remain exposed at its sides.
Cycles
Sometimes the ritual is greater than what we can immediately see. Shaakira, fully aware of our disconnection from sources of production, visited tea farms in Sri Lanka as part of her design research. She found epic machines where tea leaves were blown, their moisture drawn out, and leaves dried. Conceptually, Shaakira sought to bring back the evaporated water to the teacup. Tea Drop advances a known scientific mechanism, utilising phase change to absorb moisture from the surrounding environment and condense it into a water drop — all made possible by the fan, cooling and heating elements. The heating-cooling pattern that prompts condensation is a scientific cycle of its own — a ritual even the smallest particles partake in. The process is slow. It is an invitation to pause, to remember that this vapour is returning to the teapot while the process-in-reverse continues at the farms in South Asia.
A similar principle is employed in her Aquatecture project, a vertical water harvesting panel for urban areas, which too began with both scientific research and a desire for connection: the Namib Desert Beetle and Tillandsia plant species are physiologically structured to harvest water from the air and were steady companions in the early research stages.
On the other hand, her second source point — slaughterhouses — were places of trauma where Shaakira witnessed cows being stunned and killed mechanically. How, then, to break this line of production? How can we become more connected to the source of our consumption? Empathy. Radical empathy. In employing a methodology of connection in her practice — to food, to the animal other — Shaakira teaches through experience. In her second-year classes at the Design Academy Eindhoven, one of the assignments, In Your Shoes, requires students to physically embody their chosen persona: chickens, urban bats, and even a cow on its way to slaughter. Empathy exercises, like role playing, encourage students out of their comfort zone, disrupting the ordinary chain of events, the disconnection from the source, and, most importantly, altering their relationship to the subject matter. A bat impersonator may keep out their sight and tune into the possibility of echolocation as communication. This is followed by analysis to reveal design guidelines. ‘At first they find it really strange. Like, why do I have to do this? Why do I have to act weird?’ Shaakira comments. But, slowly, something changes.
The fullness of the ritual is its recognition of the beginning. It is the final water drop, transformed from vapour, dripping into the teacup. From Sri Lanka to the Netherlands, the ritual is complete.
The end is the beginning
Her exploration of biomaterials has occurred in several iterations. The first, Body Mining, harvested bodily waste — hair, nails, and other waste — processing these and testing them as additives to porcelain.
In a recent iteration of her creative experimentation with organic matter, Shaakira tests the potential of eggshells, spinach, oyster shells, rice husks amongst other substances. Sporosarcina pasteuriiis well-researched and even used in experiments to harden sand with urine, turning it into bricks. Based in a lab in the Netherlands, she experiments with combining waste and organic streams, assessing their performance and creating new materials. Shell_ter, it’s called. It breathes life at the end of the ritual. What is forgotten at the end of one ceremony becomes part of the next.
“’Isn’t the egg an amazing piece of architecture? A hard protective shell with life forming within. Built by the chicken within its own body. There are secrets waiting to be unveiled in the unseeming rituals all around us, and these secrets carry massive potential for the design of our future,’ says Shaakira.”
