Sumayyah Súnmádé Raji

Much Ado About Yam traces the yam’s history across the Black diaspora and its relevance to architecture and building materials. The project highlights the yam as more than an ingredient for a meal—it spurred communal social gatherings, held significance in traditional rites, was stacked as a fundamental structural component in yam barns, and provided enslaved people with the means to earn income for self-emancipation. Unlike the colonial framework of separating plant from man and object from context, this project seeks to create an honest archive of yam histories from a social, cultural, spatial, and material perspective.

Sumayyah Súnmádé Raji is a cultural archivist, architectural designer, and materials researcher exploring the spatial and material intelligence embedded in African and diasporic cultural traditions. Through objects, drawings, performance, and dialogue, she draws from these traditions to propose new frameworks for making and building. Grounded in the belief that indigenous material knowledge holds answers for the built environment, her work approaches everyday materials as living archives of cultural memory and ecological practice. Sumayyah holds an M.Arch from Harvard University and a B.Sc. in Architecture and Environmental Design (Hons) from Morgan State University. She is the host of The Native [Nigerian] podcast, a 2023 Biennale College Architettura Participant, and a member of NEW INC.