Liverpool Biennial and RIBA North have commissioned Mae-ling Lokko to develop a new large-scale installation called Hack the Root. The installation will be ‘grown’ in a series of public Grow-It-Yourself workshops using an agrowaste-fed fungus, with the live growth of the panels being viewable at RIBA North. Ahead of the opening of Liverpool Biennial 2018 in July, join Mae-ling Lokko to hear all about the project and the process.

Mae-ling Lokko (b. 1987, Taif, Saudi Arabia) lives between Accra, Ghana and New York, USA. Trained as an architectural historian and building-material technologist, Lokko is an Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, USA. Her work centres on the upcycling of agro-waste and biopolymer materials into 'high' performance building material systems. Inspired by emerging multidisciplinary research on next generation biocomposite green materials as well as Ghanaian contemporary art waste upcycling, Lokko often integrates into her architectural work a broad range of technical, environmental, political and cultural criteria that questions contemporary material-value systems and evolves material upcycling criteria.