Her work explores putting porous boundaries between things at various scales and materiality. She is currently exploring sticky and stinky themes of comfort, air conditionoing, and sweat while working on a collaborative world building project, temporarily titled “surreal suburb” through a design collective, Unihoro Supply.
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- living skin eats the toxic skin
- Site: (40.22,-73.99)
- Project timeline: 2021-
- Author: Ahzin Nam
Modern history attempted to secure the comfort of predictability against nature through layers of chemical and synthetic building materials. With chemical contaminants entering bloodstreams, lead poisoning caused by domestic surfaces became an epidemic that have most affected lower income occupants of under-maintained buildings. Often requiring methods of complete displacements of the occupants and labor intensive methods that require melting and stripping down surfaces, Hyper-contaminated home is a proposal to create a living fungal mycelium plug in system to sequester heavy metal ions from lead contaminated surfaces.
I. Rotten home:
Contrary to the narratives of novel myco-materials, we are already living with fungi, in a dynamic closer to the fungal zombie. They live on walls, in walls, on us, and in us. The black spots against the white walls, the territorial marks of black molds, become the visual sign of health hazard, making the image of a rotten home. Alien organisms and the forces of wind and water expose the skeleton, decay the skin, and parasitically grow on cellulosic structures. Pests and unknown illnesses loom in the dark and damp spaces. The precarity and unpredictability made a rotten home a space that is no longer safe for us.
II. The Collapsed History of Chemically Contaminated Home:
The “off-the-shelves” materials in neat packaging guaranteed the homeowners water, fire, insects, mold, air-proof homes. The wall no longer became a sheet of wood or a stack of stones. Between the outer surface and the inner freshly painted white surface, we now have layers of plastic insulation, vapor barriers, fungicide-treated wood, fiber-glass, dry wall, primer, and paint. Here, we encounter the collapsed history of a new contaminated home.
III. Hypercontaminated Home:
Before we haphazardly transfer the toxicity around us from our homes to landfills, soil, water, and back to our blood, we need a new approach to peeling off the toxic skin. And for the process, we must revisit the organisms that we were planning to scrub, melt, and kill off in the first place. As the previous arrays of petri dish (Section B) shows, our buildings are already composed of organisms.
Mycelium sequester lead ions during their growth by binding lead ion to their body and removing the toxins from their immediate environments. A variety of species of fungi, such as Pleurotus, Aspergillus, Trichoderma have proven to be effective in the removal of heavy metal in marine environment, wastewater, and on land. The mycoremediation process has been used along the horizontal plane in or above the ground level, but we could reimagine the process of vertically rotating the plane of remediation, curing the toxic skin of the buildings that we occupy.