The works are hand-dyed with ferrallitic earth pigments sourced from the western highlands of Cameroon, yielding a chromatic range from scorched ochres to muted reds. These pigments reference the soil of Batoufam, the site of Mpoka’s paternal home, where red clay and sun-dried bricks remain the dominant building materials. Here, the land functions not only as geographic ground, but as a conceptual one—a substrate through which cultural identity and ancestral presence are made tangible.
By interweaving archival material, ancestral craft, and geologic matter, Mpoka articulates a counter-architecture—one shaped by rupture and return, by the fragment and the gesture. Architecture of the Self proposes identity not as a stable construct, but as a continually negotiated space: built, unbuilt, and rebuilt through care, memory, and intimate acts of making.
Architecture of the Self: What Lives With(in) Us
Mallory Lowe Mpoka
2022 — ongoing
In Architecture of the Self: What Lives With(in) Us, Mallory Lowe Mpoka traces the entanglements of memory, identity, and material inheritance through a practice grounded in the poetics of the domestic and the diasporic. Working across photography, textiles, collage, and embroidery, she draws from her family’s vernacular photo archive and textile fragments to investigate how cultural memory is preserved, reconfigured, and embodied through touch, labor, and repair.
At the core of the series are secondhand cotton textiles salvaged from her family’s sewing workshop in Douala, Cameroon. As the descendant of a lineage of male sewers and textile manufacturers, Mpoka approaches these materials not merely as cloth, but as repositories of intergenerational knowledge—archives that bear the physical and symbolic imprints of gendered labor. Through acts of cutting, dyeing, and embellishment, she reconstructs these remnants into layered compositions that blur the line between preservation and transformation. Textile, in her hands, becomes both a document of the past and a speculative architecture for the self.
