Estuary and Ecofantasy: The Everyday Lives of Nipa Palm between Builder and Botanist

This text follows a well-known botanist along the shoreline of a Philippine island as he takes photographs of nipa palm ( nypa fruticans ), in its passage from plant to building part. It is January 1940 and David Fairchild is interested in plants for the collection of his new botanical garden in Miami, nicknamed ‘the kampong’. He takes a photograph of nipa being woven into roof shingles by women sitting cross-legged, watched by children. At the lens of Fairchild’s camera, the material forms of two world orders converge. One is the process of building construction in archipelagic Southeast Asia, a gendered process of manual fabrication where muscle-memory guides the way and instruction is by observation. The second is that of the camera, that tool of observation, tracking, and extracting of tropical environments. The article discusses the agency of these women in the context of the history of everyday labour forms that are systematically overlooked in architectural history, showing instead how the process is crucial to a contemporary body politics of the South and European perceptions of the tropics.