A journey in designing resistance: From biology to architecture

“While studying biology, I realized I was most drawn to the hands-on lab work — designing experiments, testing ideas, and building frameworks,” she says. She decided to pursue architecture at Dalhousie University to understand the social, ecological, and political contexts and to explore design’s engagement with these layers.

Reimagining the plantation landscape

Plantation Futures is a collaboration between Abba and her colleague and friend, Enrique Cavelier. What began as a joint thesis quickly evolved into a powerful critique of colonial legacies in the American South. “We wanted to take on the continuum of colonialism and examine design’s role in both obscuring and sustaining systems of racial violence,” says Abba.

Their research, which began in 2022, focused on a plantation site in Louisiana where they employed both traditional and experimental methods, including drawings, soil studies, 3D scans, poetry, and textiles, to uncover the silenced histories of the sites. Rather than speaking solely through their own perspectives, they engaged the public through exhibitions and conversations, inviting dialogue around memory, violence, and heritage.

The project foregrounds resistance and transformation, highlighting the entangled lives of humans and non-humans on the plantation. “Our interventions shift focus away from the master’s house and toward the spaces where resilience occurred, such as the ditch, the swamp, and the plot,” Abba says. “These were not only sites of labour but also places of refuge, care, and survival that challenged the logic of extraction and racial hierarchy.”

Non-human actors such as soil, sediment, trees, and the river were treated as active participants. “By acknowledging their agency, the project reveals how the plantation was never fully controlled and how ecological systems contribute to ongoing resistance,” says Abba. “Through spatial and material interventions  Plantation Futures proposes a decolonial approach to conservation: one that foregrounds marginalized histories, ecological agency, and the possibility of restorative futures.”

Global recognition and future directions

Featured in the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale under the theme "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.," Plantation Futures was showcased in the “Natural” section. Their installation of a digital model of Oak Alley Plantation layered with an eco-poem gave voice to the land itself. “The poem doesn’t simply describe the land; it speaks from it, channelling voices that are often silenced… whether that’s toxic air, the oaks, the river, or the soil,” explains Abba.

Preparing for the Biennale over five to six months came with its own set of challenges, including the need to distill years of research into a single, coherent thread to ensure clarity. 'It was difficult to condense the breadth and depth of our work into a 10–13-minute silent film,' Abba admits. “But the inclusion in the Biennale marked a significant moment in that institutions are beginning to recognize the necessity of confronting architecture’s complicities with racial capitalism and environmental violence.” It also connected Abba and Cavelier with a global community of designers working at the intersection of spatial justice, ecology, and memory.

Abba hopes visitors leave with a deeper understanding that the plantation is not a closed chapter in history. Its violence persists in landscapes like “Cancer Alley,” where environmental harm continues to affect Black communities. She also critiques the repurposing of plantation sites for leisure, often stripped of their violent legacies. The project challenges designers to confront this continuum of harm and ask how we can engage with these spaces without replicating or erasing it.

Equally vital is recognizing the plantation as a site of resistance. Abba and Cavelier traced defiant histories encoded in the land through soil, oral traditions, and ecological practices, especially in overlooked spaces like the ditch, the swamp, and the plot. Building on the momentum from Venice, Abba is now writing about Black ecologies and researching the environmental violence of monocrop agriculture, including sugarcane burning and tidal rice farming. Her advice to emerging designers: stay curious, embrace interdisciplinary methods, and don’t shy away from difficult subjects that often lead to the most meaningful work.

The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale opened in May 2025 and is running until November.