A Hybrid Path: Miriam Hillawi Abraham on Worldbuilding, Heritage, and New Canons

Portrait of Miriam by Paloma Lounice, 2023.

By Julia Gamolina

Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, she works with spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism and intersectionality. Miriam holds an MFA in Interaction Design from the California College of the Arts and a BArch in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art. She is a Mellon researcher for the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Digital Now multidisciplinary project.

Miriam's work has been featured in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia as well the 2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennial and the 14th Shanghai Biennale, “Cosmos Cinema.” In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Miriam talks about new paths for worldbuilding and engaging all living things, advising those just starting their careers to find their people.

JG: You have such a unique focus in our field, focusing on digital media, futurism, working as a game-code instructor. What are you most focused on for 2025, and what do you think all of us in the field of architecture should be paying attention to?

MHA: Moving into 2025, I’ve been shifting my focus towards what I refer to as “living materials.” This is not to say I have abandoned the digital realm altogether, because it’s this non-extractive tool and a space where I can keep testing and imagining before or in between physical outputs or processes. But following my recent work, The Museum of Artifice for the second Sharjah Architecture Triennial, in which I translated the architecture of the basalt bedrock of the Lalibela monoliths into another living yet more mutable material, salt, I’ve become more interested in this idea of architecture as a mode of co-producing or making with other living organisms, a convergence of different authors of life on earth.

Faced with ecocide, displacement and dispossession in the Global South, there is a sense of urgency within the fields of architecture and design to reorient ourselves and divert the destructive path of our global industries. Dismantling geopolitics through “geopoetics” to borrow Kathryn Yusoff’s language, would require us to understand the immaterial knowledge systems of the Othered, indigenous and nomadic land stewardship and other modes of planetary existence.

The Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. A Journey into The New Virtual by Miriam Hillawi Abraham, 2023.

The Abyssinian Cyber Vernaculus. Miriam Hillawi Abraham, 2019-2022.

Going back a little first, you studied architecture and interaction design in Scotland and in California. What were you hoping to do with both degrees, and what did you learn from both contexts?

Growing up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I had this desire to change the city around me to make it a more inclusive and sustainable environment that reflected our collective identity and helped us imagine a better future. I think I understood change or progress as something linked to design and construction because of my father’s work as a civil engineer.

I struggled to do this heroic thing however within the parameters of the discipline of architecture after I graduated. I began to understand architecture and design through bodies and systems, rather than thinking of buildings as solutions. I shifted into this multi-disciplinary design course to explore other mediums. This process taught me how to work and experiment with lower stakes, to think across scales and ultimately, just learn through play.

What I am able to now do, emerging from these experiences, is to channel my work through different disciplines, mediums, and technologies, while still staying true to the central themes and inquiries. I make work for myself, to please myself and sate my own curiosity but always come to find that it serves others and resonates with my contemporaries.

“I’ve become more interested in this idea of architecture as a mode of co-producing or making with other living organisms, a convergence of different authors of life on earth.”

— Miriam Hillawi Abraham

How did the CCA Architecture and Intersectionality research project come about? What are your priorities for it as we enter 2025?

I applied to an open call for CCA’s The Digital Now in 2020 and we’re now editing and compiling our research as a collective of eight fellows. My individual research project was called the Repository Of Digital Cosmologies and it looked at cosmology, rooted in the African Sahel, as a multi-scalar dimensional practice of embodied technologies and cartography. Although this project is being finalized at the moment, I will be continuing the work through different channels and aiming to make it more widely accessible while expanding its geographic reach as a “cosmic atlas” as it travels to new places and encounters other worldviews or “lifeworlds.”

Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?

I joined architecture school with all these heroic notions of building big and beautiful things that would pave the way to the future for Ethiopia, the Horn of Africa, the continent, beyond! But I quickly became disillusioned with the field as my colleagues and I found ourselves grappling with the issue of being denied subjectivity as Black and brown students of architecture, while our own heritage was deemed primitive or at best naturally quaint when appropriated and deployed by others.

As debilitating as that was, it fueled me with the desire to corrupt and modify this archaic, elitist and Eurocentric profession in my own small way. I wanted to find forms that do not prioritize the white male gaze, practices that did not exploit and exhaust our environments and spaces that were inclusive and accessible to everyone. This frustration drove me to find a path on the fringes of architectural practice, a hybrid career path that still deals with architectural history, theory and the built world through other means outside of the industry’s toolset.

Who are you admiring now and why?

My practice is always informed and enriched by the work, language, and methods of other creative practitioners. Cave Bureau is really cool. As fellow East Africans — they are based in Nairobi, Kenya — we share a geological terrain and are connected through nomadic routes and traditions across our borders and now within our practices. What’s cool about their practice is that they’re able to articulate our physical landscapes as both architecture and ecological heritage. They have created these visually stunning installations that bring together ancestral knowledge systems and a dynamic futurism through the vastness of geologic time. It’s like a new planetary roadmap beyond the absolutes of colonialism and ecocide, and drawing from this embodied knowledge we were beginning to forget on this continent.

Decolonizing Architecture Art Research’s (DAAR) work is absolutely critical, as they apply architectural practice and pedagogy within justice driven dimensions. They’ve built a whole language and formalism around these ideas while working closely with communities in precarious conditions and under violent architectural regimes. Their concrete tent, which I was able to experience at the opening of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial last year, is a testament of permanent temporariness, which for so many who are displaced and relocated to “temporary” shelters can be a lifelong condition. Architecture has to respond and reflect on these ways of living and not just the ideals projected through capital driven industries.

Similarly, Dr. Samia Henni’s work as an architectural historian and writer deals with colonial legacies — what was imagined, what has been built and what has been destroyed. Dr. Henni teaches us how to equip or arm ourselves against continued exploitation and dispossession. Read her books!

“... find your people! A support system is crucial but so is learning how to think and work collectively within your community.”

— Miriam Hillawi Abraham

What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?

I am conscious of how the built environment and its maintenance and expansion are largely responsible for degradation of our planet and how the most vulnerable communities will be those who are historically and actively tied to land and ocean — indigenous and nomadic peoples who have been threatened by colonialism and imperialism from the start.

To me, preserving and continuing their knowledge and practices of placemaking is crucial, as is expanding our gaze beyond the human towards other actors — living materials, membranes and matter. I want to keep working towards this through worldbuilding, and through understanding and extending cosmologies and other ways of imagining.

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?

Architecture — both in school and work — is still a hostile space for most identities and bodies, especially those that it had not classically centered in its canon. It can feel really alienating for BIPOC architects and designers entering the field, particularly for women and femmes. What I would say to those wanting to enter this field is find your people! A support system is crucial but so is learning how to think and work collectively within your community. Seek out creative practitioners and activists who reflect your ideals and expand your worldview outside of the curriculum and industry.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.