Willow Technologies Ghana

Repost from @maelokko • We are excited to announce that reservations are now open for a unique dining experience.  As part of El Anatsui’s Tema Artists Residency 2021, @maelokko and @satadika have a few select seats available for our dining exhibition, The Rise and Fall of Ghana’s Cash Crops.  The menu features coconut and rice crops which we have been passionate about. The return to the communal table represents an important site for the unalienating the act of eating from rituals of food production and exchange. For their dinner exhibition, Lokko and Atadika search for the “root” of the Ghanaian table, represented by the vernacular wooden "apampa" market tray. Commonly carried on the heads of Ghanaian market women to temporarily store, transport, display and sell food ingredients, the apampa tray is used to carry both fresh ingredients and cooked food as they navigate both marketplace and streets of the city.  Using three sizes of apampa trays, the dining table is reconstructed to allow individual consumption of meals, sharing and those that offer visibility and co-authorship. A central stream of apampa trays run through the middle offering pathway for plants, micro-ingredients, including minerals, spices and herbs to be surveyed, reached for and used by those eating the meal. We hope you will be able to join us while we share a multi-sensory experience highlighting the past present and future of the agroecologies of Ghana. Book your seat now! [see link in profile] Video credit: Mae-ling Lokko . . . With: @satadika @maelokko    @midunu   @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology

There are two types of cultivated rice on our planet— those that originate from Asia, oryza sativa, and those from Africa, oryza glaberrima steud. From Afife to Akpafu Odomi, our visits to rice farms across Ghana’s Volta region confirmed accounts of our dwindling heritage of oryza glaberrima nationally. Of the farms commercially producing rice in the Volta region, we only came across one large cooperative of 2000 women still growing oryza glabberrima. Resistant to diseases and pests, and better at tolerating fluctuations in water, iron toxicity, severe climate change and human neglect, oryza glabberrima is highly nutritious. Accounts of vast fields of glabberrima rice cultivation along the Upper Guinea coast in the 15th century show the central role this cereal played in local diets. In response to this large-scale displacement of glabberima rice, we sourced 10 grams of 126 accessions of rice from @africarice with help from the world’s @croptrust . Half of these are oryza glabberima that we have been cultivating with the near term goal of scaling them up for seed-sharing. Grown between 3-4months and before our second round of harvest, all 126 rice species will surround the table at the “The Rise and Fall of Ghana’s Cash Crops” dinner coming this July. #staytuned Video credits: Mae-ling Lokko . . . With @maelokko @satadika @midunu @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology

Midunu X Willow (@midunu @willowtechnology ) Over the next two months we will be sharing snippets of conversations, themes and the design of the forthcoming dinner exhibition "On the Rise and Fall of Ghana's cash crops" coming in July 2022. This dinner exhibition was developed during the 2021-22 El Anatsui's Tema Art Residency program. #watchthisspace #nomadicdinner #coconut #rice. Video Credit: Mae-ling Lokko

Thank you to the team at @adapt_____ @british_design @cove_park @arcarchitectsscotland for this wonderful video clip Repost from @adapt_____ • “In reality, water isn’t the problem. Water is just water. It’s people that are the problem. The way people are living now.” Cove Park (@cove_park ) is an international artists residency centre located on an outstanding rural site on Scotland's west coast. Cove Park’s project was chosen in the Future by Design open call, designed to support an international collaborative project which focussed on climate change and the voice of young people. Cove Park brought together Ghanaian-Filipino agro-waste designer Mae-ling Lokko @maelokko and Scottish architect Tom Morton of Arc Architects @arcarchitectsscotland to collaboratively design a hybrid, eco-sustainable and accessible ‘open landscape classroom’ on the 50-acre site where Cove Park resides. They worked in collaboration with a multidisciplinary cohort of young people from across Scotland – including students from the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow – and the interdisciplinary @Ashesi Entrepreneurship Center in Ghana, to co-design and co-programme spaces that are conducive to knowledge exchange around the impacts of climate change on water – an urgent issue in both countries. Site footage provided by Cove Park and Tom Morten: Arc Architects Other footage from Videezy.com and Pexels.com In celebration of the United Nations COP26 summit in Glasgow last year, the @britishcouncil commissioned a number of projects with the aim to involve young people, groups, and communities who are underrepresented in climate change discussions. Design, editing and production by Adapt More videos to come.

Exploring shifts in protein consumption in the Ghanaian diet serves as a starting point for rethinking our traditonal foodways. Ongoing research on the Ghanaian diet has revealed an increase in animial protein (657 g/person/day chicken, 412 g/person/day pork, 477 g/person/day fish, 410 g/person/day beef, 211 g/person/day egg and 148 g/person/day sausage). Conversely, studies looking a vegetarian population of urban Ghana reveals such diets typically have low dietary diversity which may lead to inadequate nutrient intakes. Photo 1: Tatale and Aboboi using bambara beans as a source of protein and carbohydrates, while transforming overripe plantain; Photo 2: A take on rice and beans using heritage grain millet for texture, nutrition; Photo 3: Groundnuts and plantain are a quintessential and balanced street food with protien, carbohydrates and fat. Here's taking Kofi Brokeman to Richman. Image credits 1,3 : Francis Kokoroko for Midunu Image credit 2: Selassie Atadika With @satadika @maelokko @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology #rice #coconut #futureghanakitchen #agriculture #agroecologies #MidunuxWillow #palavapalava #agricultureXdesignXfood #monocrop #mixedcropping #hybridseeds #biodiversity #traditionalagriculture #indigenouscrops #proka #integratedlifecycles #foodways

With globalization, modernization and urbanization, several factors tilt the influence on the survival Ghanaian indigenous foodways. For our foodway to not only survive but thrive over time, we need to manage 21st century risks and work towards sustainable production and consumption patterns. To enable our food to be --sufficient, affordable and nutritious-- while ensuring living wages for farmers and producers, our recipes and culinary knowledge need to be passed down from generation to generation while embracing innovation continuously. Image content: Selassie Atadika GIF: Mae ling Lokko With @satadika @maelokko @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology

Foodways are the interplay between economics, culture and society and how they impact our food production and consumption patterns in cultures and subcultures. Stemming from traditional practices, culture, and history, foodways are dynamic, changing over time and have direct influences on what we eat. Powerful factors shifting our foodways include: Economy Trade Health Nutrition Art Culture Agriculture Biodiversity Politics Policy What other unique factors in the shape of Ghanaian foodways? Image Credits: Francis Kokoroko for Midunu With @satadika @maelokko @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology #rice #coconut #futureghanakitchen #agriculture #agroecologies #MidunuxWillow #palavapalava #agricultureXdesignXfood #monocrop #mixedcropping #hybridseeds #biodiversity #traditionalagriculture #indigenouscrops #proka #integratedlifecycles #foodways

Repost from @maelokko • The proka ball consists of two primary material systems -- the mycelium exterior skin and the clay seed bomb. Both are organic, biodegradable mixtures that integrate domestic food waste and require no other tools other than two sizes of stainless steel mixing bowls commonly used for baking. The mycelium dome allows rain to roll off its naturally hydrophobic surface and serves as thermal insulation and humidity control within its internal environment where seed bombs are stored. Anyone can pluck one or more seed bombs off the skewer and bomb indiscriminately. Once the seed bomb meets the surface of a garden patch, pot or green roof, a seed bomb can take about three weeks to germinate but can vary depending on climatic conditions and rainfall. In urban neighbourhoods with dense concrete hardscaping, seed bombs will eventually roll their way onto fertile surfaces with help of urban waterways. In their dehydrated form, Proka seed libraries are just another manifestation of a soil ecology used above ground. Image Credits: 1-3: Selassie Atadika, 4-9: Mae-ling Lokko With @satadika @maelokko @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology

We learned about proka on our visit to meet Dr. Boa at the Center for No Till Agriculture (@cnta_ ). The name proka is taken from an old farming practice in Ashanti region in Ghana, where the residues of maize and other crops were left over the surface of the soil after harvest as a protective, generative layer. Much like the maternal practice of nourishment and protection of life within an embryo, the growing of each proka seed library occurs through the help of mycelium organisms that feed on organic food waste materials. Image credits: Mae ling Lokko With @satadika @maelokko @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology

Proka is a seed library design focused on leveraging the domestic material ecology as part of an integrated material life cycle and production infrastructure; where practices of domesticity are nested within a larger agricultural and waste upcycling economy. Today, seeds belong in the beginning of a long-winded, powerful engine of the modern-day food economy that employs just over 28% of the human population and generates billions of tons of material losses and emissions throughout the process. As domestic consumers of food, it is common to believe that the life of a seed ends in the act of eating. Yet as we scrape the waste off our half-eaten plates into our kitchen bins, we continue to directly participate in the production of 1.3 billion tonnes of food waste each year. In many senses, just as eating is an agricultural act, so are each of our diverse kitchen waste rituals. Image credits: Mae-ling Lokko. Stay tuned for Proka ball recipe #comingsoon With @satadika @maelokko @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology

Our recent trips to the Central, Volta and the Northern regions remain important for broadening our understanding of the work beyond objectified outputs, whether it's a beautiful plated dish or a sculptural panel. Thinking back to that trip to Kofi Boa’s Center for No-Till Agriculture (@cnta_ ), just outside of Kumasi, one of the most exciting things about that trip for me was realizing that traditional Ghanaian farming had such a sophisticated social and climactic understanding of returning value to the land. For example the farmers would sell their produce in the market and bring back waste from that market to cover the topsoil surface of the farm. Over time all those layers of nutrients eventually decomposed to restore health to the soil. With @satadika @maelokko @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology

Our first collaboration in 2018 with Gustavo Crembil, Palaver + Palaver, as part of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial activated a discussion around the spatialization and life cycle of the kitchen in response by intersecting drivers - food, food waste and culture. Much like many other parts of the world, trade liberalization and its ushering in of imported commodities for Ghanaian consumers, worked its way into the Ghanaian home changing the materials it was built with, introducing shiny, display kitchens and changing forever what was put on the plate. Today, the amount of locally-sourced components of contemporary Ghanaian cuisine is shrinking, alongside a knowledge ecosystem around the diverse inventory and processing of local food resources and their fascinating use of by-products from the food value chain. With @satadika @maelokko @midunuinstitute @willowtechnology