EARTH ARCHITECTURE

Dineo Seshee Bopape is a South African contemporary artist known for her multimedia installations, video art, sculptures, and performances, in which she incorporates organic materials like soil (EARTH), coal, ash, and clay.  Her environmental installations delve into themes of memory, identity, and belonging, pushing visitors to experience soil in a completely different way. 

Bopape’s art draws heavily on African cosmologies, oral histories, and indigenous knowledge systems, addressing the complexities of belonging and displacement. Born in Polokwane, South Africa, the artist takes from her own experience and weaves narratives that investigate archetypes and myths in which the female figure plays a central role.

Her practice reflects on the body, emotions, trauma, and the unseen or spiritual dimensions of life. Her installations evoke layered meanings and leave room for ambiguity. Viewers must therefore engage with both material and metaphor.

With memory, belonging, and place.

Her installations have been featured all around the world, making it toPirelli HangarBicocca’s gallery in Milan, Italy with  Born in the first light of the morning [moswara’marapo].

This exposition asks the question: What Memories are preserved in Stones, Water, and Earth?

Here, historical and geographical references are brought together, to reflect on the memory, and more specifically the transmission of memory through natural elements like water and earth, and the use of sounds and words as healing.   The installation draws on the symbolic use of earth, organic elements, and rituals, alluding to ancestral connections, healing practices, and African cosmologies. “Moswara’marapo” translates from Sesotho to “the smell of bones,” which adds a layer of meaning to the work, suggesting ideas of mortality, memory embedded in the earth, and the cycles of life and death.

“Born in the first light of the morning [moswara’marapo]” is just one example of the ways Dineo Seshee Bopape translates memory, spirituality, and materiality into powerful artistic experiences. But her work extends far beyond this single installation. From “Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings]” to  “More/Moreana,” Bopape’s art challenges us to engage deeply with themes of identity, healing, and historical trauma.

Her use of natural elements like soil, water, and ash does more than reflect the material world—it urges us to question our relationship with these elements. Her work invites us to consider how land and memory are intertwined and how ancestral knowledge persists within the earth and within us. Through her installations, Bopape reminds us that nature is not just a backdrop to human experience but a living archive that holds our histories, traumas, and hopes for transformation.

References

• Soil, Dust, Life: Dineo Seshee Bopape on Her Earthy, Searching Art
• Toronto Biennial of Art 
• Pirelli HangerBicocca
• Between Mud, Matter and Mother

Rafa Esparza is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist, known for exploring the intersections of history, identity, and place through his work. Born and raised in East L.A., Esparza draws inspiration from his Mexican-American culture. His installations, performances, and sculptures delve into themes of colonization, queer identity, and environmental concerns, critiquing ideologies, power structures and binaries. Esparza frequently collaborates with other artists and his community, including his family members.

His most prominent works consists of building adobe structures in unconventional spaces, such as the Los Angeles River and art galleries. This in reference to both his familial roots and indigenous building traditions they also emphasize the labor and traditional skills involved.

“I just knew that adobe had a special place in his own personal history, and I thought it could be a good way to start  having conversations about some guidance that I needed at the time as a young person coming into adulthood. What it did, in fact, was allow us to share space without being at each other’s necks, while he passed down this way of working with land”

Rafa Esparza, on mending his relationship with his father through earth

Esparza challenges institutional frameworks and addresses socio-political issues (e.g. immigration, race, and marginalization). His work, at its core, is about storytelling and resistance, using art as a platform to engage with broader discussions on identity and systemic injustice.

In Whitney’s 2017 Biennial, in New York City, Rafa Esparza’s Figure/Ground: Beyond the White Field, created an immersive microclimate.  What was once, a white cubed gallery is covered in what Esparza calls “brown matter,” adobes; a mixture of hay, clay, horse dung, and water from the LA River, baked under California sun, and transported across U.S. coast’s. By invitation fellow queer artists to become adoberos, and helped to collectively created nearly five thousand adobes for the installation.

“Brown matter” or adobe is used not only in reference to skin color, but also a broad range of conversations on race, nationality, ethnicity, and gender and the intersections therein. Most especially, concerns surrounding the 2016 U.S. Presidential election of Trump.

To complete the installation, five other artists were invited to exhibit their mixed-media artwork within the adobe rotunda. The adobe rotunda plays is both an artwork itself and a space for exhibiting the work of others (figure and ground).

References

• Juxtapoz, rafa esparza: A Sense of Generosity
• United States Artists: rafa esparza
• Common Wealth and Council: rafa esparza
• Queer Art: rafa esparza
• South West Contemporary: Figure/Ground
• Whitney Biennial 2017: Rafa Esparza

The Earth Campus in Tatale, Ghana, is a vocational training center designed to promote sustainable development through education and practical skill-building in one of Ghana’s rural regions, close to the Togo border. The project focuses on providing young people with the skills needed to support their families and counteract rural exodus. It is operated by the Salesians with the Don Bosco mission, which aims to empower the local community through sustainable techniques and education.

The campus offers training in sustainable construction methods such as adobe masonry, rammed earth, and timber structures. It also includes programs in agriculture, electrical training, domestic economy, and nutrition, giving students a broad range of skills. The campus is designed to incorporate local building traditions while teaching modern adaptations of these methods, blending vernacular architecture with contemporary sustainable techniques.

The use of local, natural materials such as earth plays a crucial role in reducing environmental impact while creating economic opportunities for the community. The project also uses natural ventilation strategies, ensuring comfort in the hot and humid climate of the region. The overall goal is to make the campus a model for how development projects can foster both environmental sustainability and social empowerment by maximizing local resources.

Through its design, the Earth Campus serves as an example of how architecture can be a tool for development. It challenges the conventional approach of using industrialized, imported materials in aid projects and demonstrates the benefits of building with locally available resources. This ensures that the added value remains within the community, fostering long-term sustainability and cultural preservation.

About the architect:

Anna Heringer is a renowned architect from Germany. She studied at the University of Art and Industrial Design Linz in Austria, focusing on sustainable architecture using local materials and techniques. Her work is rooted in creating environmentally and socially responsible architecture.

Heringer’s philosophy centers on sustainability and empowering communities through architecture. She emphasizes the use of natural, local materials, aiming to create socially and ecologically responsible structures. Her projects often focus on education, community development, and uplifting marginalized regions, particularly through vocational training and local engagement.

Anna Heringer runs her architectural practice, Studio Anna Heringer, with projects across the globe, including in Bangladesh, Ghana, and Europe. Her designs are grounded in cultural sensitivity and sustainable practices that challenge conventional construction norms.

Citations:

• Anna Heringer, “Tatale Earth Campus Project,” Anna Heringer Official Website, accessed October 15, 2024, https://www.anna-heringer.com/projects/vocational-school-tatale-ghana.
• Architecture for Hope, “Earth Campus Overview,” Architecture for Hope, accessed October 15, 2024, https://architectureforhope.com/work/earth-campus.html.
• Transsolar, “Tatale Educational Campus Project,” Transsolar KlimaEngineering, accessed October 15, 2024, https://transsolar.com/projects/tatale-educational-campus.

Built in 2008 in a small village called Rudrapur in Northern Bangladesh, the DESI (Dipshikha Electrical Skill Improvement) Training Center is a vocational school for electrical training. At the age of 19, the architect of this project, Anna Heringer, lived in Bangladesh for a year working with the NGO Dipshika on sustainable development. She quickly learned from her time in Bangladesh that the most successful development strategy is to “trust in existing, readily available resources and to make the best out of it instead of getting depended on external systems.”

The DESI Training Center uses traditional Bangladeshi homestead plans as basis for interrogation. As in many Central/South Asian home plans, the traditional Bangladeshi home consists of multiple structures possessing different programs situated around a central inner courtyard. The DESI building attempts to bring all of these different programs under one structure, while still utilizing traditional building methods.

The buildings main structure comprises of wattle & daub techniques utilizing thick bamboo as a lattice frame work to capture and give form to the piled earth added by hand.

In the image above, notice the circular mounds of excavated earth in the foreground. It is beautiful to realize the connection between construction and construction site sharing the same environment and materials simultaneously in an act of reciprocity.

Although a school for electrical training, most of the labor and energy placed into the build were still based on analog and traditional technologies. Here cattle are used to mix the soil that is to be used for the daub, engaging local workers and craftsmen in the process of the entire project.

It is interesting to witness an environment that was built to serve technology, in this case electrical technology, not take the form of its inherent use. A college campus may design and build an “engineering” building to feel like “engineering”, to feel technologically modern and well equipped for the learning that will occur within its walls, however the DESI Training Center shows us how these ideas and typologies can sometimes misinform the design process, and ultimately the design problem at hand.

The entire building is hooked up to solar panels for power, producing  100% of the building’s energy needs. The heating system is based on solar thermal technologies, and solar power also powers the pump for accessing water from the onsite well. This also perhaps (reference needs to be checked) the first time modern sanitary unties + septic tanks have been integrated into an earthen structure in Bangladesh.

The DESI building houses two classrooms, two offices, and two residences for the school instructors. There is a separate bathroom with two showers and two toilets for the teachers and a bathroom facility with toilets and sinks on the ground floor for the students. [source] Bearing no loss in traditional culture, material, or forms of making, this building embodies the possibilities of a modern earthen architecture applied to a specific set of requirements, needs, and programs. The DESI Training Center acts as model to realize the full potential an earthen architecture can deliver humans in the modern age, without having to compromise many facets of modernity that are considered incompatible with earth.

Size: 300m2

Location: Rudrapur, Dinajpur district, Bangladesh

Year: 2008

Photos: Team Rudrapur, B.K.S Inan,

Architects: Anna Heringer

References:

[1] https://www.anna-heringer.com/projects/desi-centre-bangladesh/ 

[2] https://divisare.com/projects/127081-anna-heringer-b-k-s-inan-desi

[3] https://www.archdaily.com/950704/desi-training-center-studio-anna-heringer

[4] https://archello.com/project/desi-dipshikha-electrical-skill-improvement