Julia Frendo

Julia Frendo is an architecture graduate from Malta based in London, UK. She is interested in the intersection of natural landscapes, architecture, modes of inhabitation, and materiality. Central to this thematic focus is the exploration of the relationships between the natural conditions of the ground, resources, and political ecologies. Her practice takes an interdisciplinary approach, driven by research, design, and media experimentation. 

Julia completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Malta (2015-19) with First-Class Honours. During this time, she also studied at the University of Kansas, USA, gaining experience in material fabrication, robotics, and experimental analogue photographic processes. This was followed by a year working at Mizzi Studio, a London-based multidisciplinary practice, until joining the RCA. While at Mizzi Studio, Julia worked on key projects such as the Royal Park Kiosks, Kew Gardens, and a façade proposal for fashion brand Saloni on Sloane Street for Chelsea in Bloom. 

Julia probes the cross-cultural dynamics of her Maltese upbringing and the influence of time that has shaped her view of a planetary garden. Her final year project focuses on the shifting ecologies of the past, questioning how food, nature, and the climate crisis may relate to the intimacy and spatial conditions of her work and practice. Threading Roots investigates the interrelated nature of varied scales of influence in the decisions we make on a daily basis - working from the seeds of exchange, colonial ecologies, and the rituals around our daily consumption and cuisine.

Her first-year work in ADS9 explored the idea of an alternative mode of living, scattered and deposited across the coastal landscape that acts as an extension of the house. The project explored the boundaries and extent of architecture, symbolizing the contact of a spatial continuum for appropriation by its inhabitants. Throughout her practice and experience at the RCA, she has focused on exploring the blurred boundaries of architecture, environmental disruption, and cohabitation—human or non-human. In her thesis investigation within ADS7, she has brought all of this together, sensitively crafting contextual relationships between natural resources and human and non-human inhabitants, culminating in Threading Roots.

Threading Roots reflects on the role humans play within the complex web of ecosystems that regulate life on Earth, where traces of our natural environment, shifting landscapes, and ecology form part of the journey travelled by human civilizations. The project works through scales of interdependencies, highlighting the interwoven nature of actions and interventions scattered across an almost exhausted quarry site. Acting as an archive to be read through the soils, produce, and consumption shifts across the island, it critically reconstructs L-Imnarja, a local agricultural feast held once a year in celebration of local craft and produce. The project works to introduce tools that promote the adaptation of a contemporary feast at various scales of intimacy.

Dissipating boundaries between people, food, and local ecologies, Threading Roots is a test bed for conviviality, access, and experimentation. It is a distributed architecture constructed using old techniques of rubble stone building and giant reed weaving as it aims to bring together the residents, the chef, and the farmers to celebrate the diversity of our local seeds, produce and forage. 

The project creates a shift in seemingly and historically divergent interests—bringing together threads of past ecologies into future assemblages of inhabitation. Following Anna L.Tsing’s theories of assemblages and contaminations described in The Mushroom at the End of the World, the interventions work inclusively with encounters’ ecological, economic, and social perspectives. As each individual and organism is influenced by their everyday meeting with the other, every decision impacts the surrounding organisms through contamination. 

Food, nature, and people are the three essential elements that, when in balance, provide a food system that supports natural systems; biodiversity, soil nutrition, and stable climatic conditions. Food security and the support of local production lead to care and subtle entanglements between human and non-human worlds while releasing carbon emission pressure from imports and regenerating our soils.

We see that the social and human may not be completely isolated from the environment and the non-human, and that it is possible to work to create collective stewardship towards the whole. Through our understanding of the complexity of our ecosystems, we may begin to learn that communities survive best when working together, not alone.