I. Before the Words
Getting to know a place, inhabiting its spaces
I arrived in New Haven a few days before the symposium began. Before stepping into the conference rooms, I was able to get to know the place in another way: walking it, looking at it, going into its spaces.
At the Yale University Art Gallery, Louis Kahn's first major building, I stopped in front of Society Woman's Cloth (Gold) (2006), by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui: an immense golden fabric that seemed to breathe against the wall. I stepped closer and discovered it was made of thousands of metal bottle caps joined with copper wire. What had once been thrown away took on another life among folds and light. I thought of the bottles we use to raise walls in Gandiol. What someone throws away is not worth the same in every pair of hands.
I also visited the Afro-American Cultural Center, founded by Black students a few decades ago. Two young people showed me around; we talked about culture and about our Africanness, and we ended up watching an African drumming and dance class.
The place I have thought about most since then is the workshop of the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA). There, earth, wood, plants and pigments were being tested: earthen reliefs, porous surfaces that absorbed and released scents, prototypes that looked like roots or corals, 3D printers at work. Inspired by the legacy of George Washington Carver, its teams had organized community workshops to make pigments from agricultural waste, clays and local minerals.
Walking through that space, I could not stop holding a conversation in my head with everything we have learned with earth and with our hands, building after building, over these last years. In the workshop I saw earth measured, tested and documented. Those who build have their own ways of checking whether a wall works, learned over time. Those who test in a laboratory use terms and instruments that end up producing certificates, the kind a bank or a government office usually asks for.
The methods are different, but some of the questions meet. What interests me is not who knows more, but what we could learn together.
One of those days, invited by Jennifer [surname], I went to a dance class. They were teaching the Thriller choreography and I followed as best I could, among strangers. Until that moment I thought I was a very good dancer. That, too, was learning by doing.
II. Between Words and Hands
Rethinking a world that is still being built
The symposium was called World Ecologies in Formation. It was organized by Anna Dyson and Mae-ling Lokko, of Yale CEA, from 29 to 31 October at the Yale School of Architecture. They brought together architects, anthropologists, engineers, artists, economists and activists from many places around one idea: the human and the non-human are not formed separately. The world, the title said, is still in formation.
Our panel opened the symposium on Thursday at half past nine. It dealt with biogenic materials, fair labor and climate adaptation in West Africa. I shared it with Ernest Dione; with Ibrahima Niang, a professor at the school of architecture in Dakar; with Nzinga Mboup, who builds in Dakar with earth and typha, the invasive plant that grows along the Senegal River; with Liz Ricketts, who works in Kantamanto, the market in Accra where much of the clothing discarded by the Global North ends up; and with Igazeuma Okoroba, who has led sustainability at a major African cement company, Dangote. Each of us came from a different point along the same chain.
I brought what we have learned at Hahatay, the association we run in Gandiol, a village of fishermen and salt workers near Saint-Louis: building with earth, rice straw and bottles; training young people on the building site, learning while building; and a question we are working on now: how to imagine a Salt Center together with the women who make their living from salt. I also brought my doubts. What was I going to tell them, when I am neither an architect nor an academic? In the end I let myself be guided more by what I could learn and by the relationships that might grow.
The power of words: naming, recognizing, excluding
The title of our panel ended with an expression I had to look up: "planetary heutagogies." Heutagogy emphasizes that learners direct their own learning. In Gandiol we talk about learning by doing, which puts the emphasis on practice, on the building site. The two ideas touch, but they are not the same.
Over three days I heard many words like that: biogenic materials, metabolisms, built ecologies, synthetic commons, geosmin… Some of them broadened the way I think. Geosmin, for example, is a substance produced by certain soil microorganisms that gives the earthy smell that rises after rain. It was incredible: that smell from my childhood had a name and could be studied. Other words, on the other hand, took me further away from the practices I know.
An academic vocabulary does not come out of nowhere. It is born from reading, from debate, from the need to distinguish what used to be confused. That has value. A word like heutagogy allows what we do in a village in Senegal to enter into dialogue with other ways of learning and to find new spaces of recognition. But our knowledge already has names, languages, histories and ways of being passed on. The question is why that knowledge sometimes needs to be translated into academic language before institutions recognize it, value it and are willing to fund it.
More than two thousand years ago, Lao Tzu opened the Tao Te Ching with these words: "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name." A name helps us see; it never fully holds what it names.
Naming also orders things. When a practice that has existed for generations receives a new name in an auditorium, it matters who uses that name afterwards, who gets cited, who receives the recognition. Would the woman who works the salt recognize it as her own?
Amid so many systems, flows and metabolisms, I sometimes wondered where the people were. We talked about value chains, but who was at each link? Who cut the straw, who gathered the salt, who carried the materials, who breathed the smoke?
I also wondered where nature was: the river, the mangrove, the salt flat, places that breathe and hold stories long before they become resources or data. How do we avoid, in trying to understand them, ending up reducing life to what we can measure, transform or sell?
I have no clean answer, because I was in that auditorium too, and I used those words too. The question applies to Yale, but also to my own village, where some knowledge weighs more than other knowledge and some voices are heard first. I would like to put it back to Anna Dyson and Mae-ling Lokko: what did they mean by "in formation," and what would they say to someone who feels there are too many new words for things that many peoples have always practiced?
Materials have a history: earth, labor and sustainability
In my mind, I went back to the Yale CEA workshop several times. The earth I saw in that laboratory and the earth we work with in Gandiol belonged to different stories. One was there to be studied; the other was part of our buildings and of the lives of those who build them.
Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, who took part in one of Friday's panels, turns Louis Kahn's famous question, "What do you want, brick?", on its head in one of her lectures: we should not ask the brick what it wants to be, but where it comes from.
That gave rise to the question that stayed with me most: are we looking for new materials to offer sustainability, or to open new markets? A material is not sustainable because of what it is. What decides it is how it is obtained and how it is used: where it is extracted, who works it and under what conditions, how far it travels, how much fuel it burns along the way, who benefits and what is left of it when it is no longer useful. The same rice straw can be sustainable on a building site in a particular territory and stop being so the day it becomes "the sustainable material" everyone wants to buy, traveling thousands of kilometers to reach whoever can pay for it and burning what it was meant to save.
Biogenic materials, the ones that grow, such as straw, fibers or wood, offer real possibilities. But when one of them starts to be in demand far away, the relationships around it change too: who owns the land where it grows, who harvests it and at what price. Liz Ricketts sees this every day in Kantamanto, where secondhand clothing arrives from the North in bales: according to The Or Foundation, around 40% leaves the market as waste. The profit stays at the start of the chain; the cost of what is left over stays at the end, in Accra. Any biogenic material could repeat that division. If we do not look at the whole chain, the only thing that changes may be the name of the commodity.
I would like to continue the conversation with my fellow panelists: who will control the value of typha if demand for it grows outside Senegal, whether cement and earth can coexist, what the difference is between a circular economy and a fair circular economy.
And I have to ask myself a question. I defend earth and straw. But if a young person in Gandiol or Dakar dreams of a concrete house, who am I to tell them to build with mud?
Sustainability cannot be thought of without the dignity of the person who lives in the house. In many places, concrete means having made it: a house that will not fall down, something you can leave to your children. Earth, on the other hand, is often associated with what people want to leave behind. Why is an earth house "sustainable" at an international conference and "poor" in a village? There are communities that choose earth for cultural reasons, for the climate or for its cost, and concrete houses that have not given more freedom to those who live in them. Who gets to choose, and with what information?
That is why I do not see a university's technology and a community's way of building as opposed. Laboratory tests can help make earth stronger, easier for building codes to accept, more dignified in the eyes of those who live in it. A community's practice can remind the laboratory that a material lives within relationships, and not only inside a testing machine. Neither of them can choose on behalf of the person who will live in the house.
Learning by doing: universities, territories and hands
At some point during the symposium, one of the participants said it out loud: what was missing was a space for doing, a workshop, an activity where we all put our hands on something. Yale has those spaces; I had visited one myself a few days earlier. But for three days we talked about earth and about working bodies without touching the mud together. We talked about learning by doing without doing.
The shape of a gathering already says a lot about how knowledge is produced. A stage and rows of chairs decide who speaks and who listens before anyone opens their mouth. The last session, on Saturday, was called The Listening Room. This time the chairs formed a circle, the microphones were spread around and the screens surrounded us. Faces were closer, contributions crossed one another, voices moved in every direction. The space had changed and, with it, the way we met.
In Gandiol, for decades, building with concrete has left construction mainly in the hands of masons. When we began to raise our own spaces, we wanted to open that process to the communities who would one day live in them. We organized collective building days, with theater, dance and sometimes concerts. The mud passed from hand to hand. Not even those who arrived impeccably dressed could resist the temptation to touch it. People began to recognize themselves in the walls before they were finished. That is what we were looking for: for the community to begin inhabiting the place long before moving into it.
The relationship between Yale and Hahatay has given us a great deal: other perspectives, tools, friendships. Young people from Gandiol who have never been through a conventional school have shared and led workshops with students from this university. We have raised straw-bale walls, made paints from iron oxide and roofs from typha, and afterwards sat down together to make radio programs. Precisely because this relationship matters, it deserves difficult questions.
Who formulates the research questions: the funded project or the community, with its own urgent needs? It also matters who does the research and who is researched, who signs what gets published, who receives the funding. And how people move: a Yale student can travel to Senegal with a plane ticket; a professor at the school of architecture in Dakar needs a visa that may not be granted.
Nor do the questions run in only one direction. What do we do with what we learn from Yale? Who does it reach within our territory, and who decides what comes in and what does not?
After three days at Yale, this is what I believe: no word, no material, no encounter has value in itself. Its value comes from the relationships that sustain it. A new word can open a door or take away from someone what was theirs. A material can care for a territory or empty it. A room can bring us together or sit us in rows. The difference is not in the thing, but in who names it, who works it and who decides. That is why the question is not whether Yale and Gandiol should learn together, but under what conditions, and who sets them.
III. The Other Tables
Where knowledge meets life
There were other tables, outside the program.
When I arrived, Mae-ling introduced me to Myles Igwebuike, a Nigerian designer and researcher. With his project Excluded Imaginaries, he studies how communities in southeastern Nigeria reorganized their spaces after the civil war. Through Nteje Studio he works with artisans from that region: he turns the Igbo ritual of sharing the kola nut into furniture that invites people to come together, such as his Oji sofas. Myles will come with the Yale students to our third community building workshop.
Faidra Oikonomopoulou drove us in her car, and the journey opened another conversation: how to give salt a new life in architecture, from brick cladding to her research on cast glass with Telesilla Bristogianni. That conversation made me imagine other paths for the Salt Center.
On the last night, Anna Dyson opened her home to all of us. There was music, laughter, bodies in motion. A gesture passed a plate; a smile invited a toast. There were no longer speakers and audience.
In Senegal we eat from the same plate. Each person eats from the part in front of them, but the plate belongs to everyone. That night, at Anna's house, I thought of that custom.
The questions return to Gandiol
On the afternoon I came home, the sun was dissolving into reflections over the salt lakes. Facing that vast wet expanse, I imagined the future Salt Center: a space that will be born from the dreams of the women who live from salt, from the hands of Gandiol's young people and from the encounter with students, artists and researchers from Yale.
I do not know if we will find all the answers. Some will have to grow out of the earth, out of the hands that work it and the relationships woven around it. In Gandiol we call it building in order to build ourselves.
The sun kept sinking over the lake. Between the water, the salt and that light that refused to disappear, there remained this world we are still learning to know.
Mamadou Dia · Hahatay · 4 November 2026
Mamadou Dia · Hahatay · 4 de noviembre de 2026