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.

“What we eat is a daily reminder that we are part of the complex cycles that make up this intricate, living earth. Food brings us into the kingdom of soil, offers the taste of sunlight, reveals the memories encoded within a seed, and holds narratives of cultural power.”

The film, Threading Roots, takes place at a point in the future, after the implementation of the project, and narrates a nostalgic timeline of the conditions faced with our ecologies on the island of Malta and the performance of the feast. It is read through scales of interdependencies, weaving through the narratives of our contradictory realities. It juxtaposes places, scales, and scenarios across the island and the site, continually displacing the viewer between fiction and reality—past, present, and future. The lack of narration overlaying selected imagery and scenes allows for a seemingly disconnected reality, giving the viewer agency to reconstruct and observe the social, economic, and ecological relations.

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Film

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HM22 Quarry, Wied il-Filep – the project focuses on a journey through the chosen strip, as an enabler for the ongoing process of distribution and appropriation of the entire site, reconstructed through time and built upon layers.

Scales of Interventions – overlapping activities and interventions are tested out as potential distribution across the quarry and further filtration into the urban.

Close up plans 1:200 – collective cooking and dining, growing pods, apiaries, gathering spaces and retaining boundaries.

Close up plans 1:200 – soil display, vegetable drying, farmers exchange, collective space and agroforestry distribution.

The reconstructed feast is a distributed architecture in celebration of interdependencies through scales of interventions broken down across the HM22 quarry site. Situated in the heart of a residential core and the agricultural north, it acts as a test bed for the reintroduction of rubble techniques, agroforestry, seed exchange, and recipe experimentation.

Rubble by Rubble – the lower coralline limestone remains of the site are reconstructed as a means of passing down the knowledge of heritage techniques of building Maltese, Ħajt Tas-Sejjieħ (dry stone rubble systems).

Landscapes of Remembrance – the intimacy of food, time and their colonial implications are witnessed through space, to connect over food where we live the history of it.

Reconstructed and Gathered – techniques for growing across the site are distributed for harvesting for the feast and as tools for conviviality, shifting through seasonality.

A Confrontation – excavated, exhausted and extracted.

Traces of the Maltese Ecologies

Terracing Agroforestry – these rubble systems were introduced in the time of the Arabs, creating balance with our soils and water irrigation.

Material Weaving – originally woven into traditional fishing traps, known as Nasses, a series of tests are replicated to create trellises and delineate pathways across the site.

Seeds of Exchange

Delineation – surviving ecologies on the island find their way in support of the transformation of local systems and dying craft.

Arundo Donax – this non-native, archaeophyte finds itself scattered across the islands' urban and infrastructural landscapes and is recognised today as one of the world's 100 worst invasive alien species.

Corridors of Mediation

Agroforestry Patches

Weaving meets Rubble

Fresh Forage and Feast

Sun-Dried Platforms

An intimacy with the soil, thread, weave and recipe building reflects the care, craftsmanship and support needed for forestry and farming.

"We can learn a lot from the mistakes made by the first Maltese. The lack of water, coupled with the destruction of soil that takes centuries to form, can cause the failure of a civilisation..." - Prof. Malone

Agriculture remains a prominent land cover at 42% of land area, displaying the heavy dependency of our rural landscape and vegetation on the islands' agricultural practices and farmers support.

The research formed part of the project's interrelated scales of development and methodology, identifying threads between the island's history, shifts in produce, shaping, and reshaping. Working through film, interviews and theory, the project became a tool to initiate further discussions on the influential traces left throughout our ecosystems through millennia of changing settlers in a complex history of coevolution.

Julia Frendo

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Royal College of Art