MOLD

2 weeks ago | thisismold.com | Sharmila Vaidyanathan

I met multidisciplinary artist Indu Antony when we were both presenting at an ethnography symposium. My paper was about what it meant for an individual to explore the city of Bengaluru on foot. Antony, on the other hand, talked about what it meant to do the same, guided by your nose. Intrigued by her project, I approached Antony after the seminar. She was standing near a table where she laid out a range of vials and scented papers ensconced in large glass bell jars to protect their odours.

4 weeks ago | thisismold.com | LinYee Yuan

This piece is a part of our series Metabolic Systems which looks into the cycles that underpin our cultures of consumption, from decay to digestion. In the first week of the new year, we witnessed an incomprehensible tragedy unfold before our eyes: Los Angeles was on fire. For 24 days, 14 firestorms tore through the city sparing nothing. The fire had its own logic, taking family homes in the historically black neighborhood of Altadena and leveling seaside mansions along the Pacific Palisades.

1 month ago | thisismold.com | Isabel Ling

Sheida Soleimani is thinking about buying a tugboat. “Imagine, I could have a studio on the water, but I could also run a hospital for seabirds at the same time,” she gushes, her thumb hovers mid-scroll above the Craigslist listing pulled up on her phone. We are standing in the intake room of Congress of the Birds, the bird clinic the Iranian-American artist and bird rehabilitator has run out of the basement of her Providence, Rhode Island home since 2018.

1 month ago | thisismold.com | Ludwig Hurtado

This piece is a part of our series Metabolic Systems which looks into the cycles that underpin our cultures of consumption, from decay to digestion. The modern undertaking of death and dying has always been about control. Control over the land, over decay, over what we leave behind, over whether we leave at all. It is a system that mirrors how we live: extract, enclose, consume, discard. We talk about carbon footprints while we live, but rarely think of the ones we leave behind in death.

1 month ago | thisismold.com | Isabel Ling

In 1959, the Ise Bay Typhoon swept through Japan’s Aichi prefecture, destroying entire agrarian communities with an onslaught of catastrophic flooding. One year later, architect Kisho Kurakawa presented his proposal for “Agricultural City,” a design concept that lofted not just buildings, but the entire city grid onto stilts, elevating the built environment four meters above agricultural soil.