Lantana

Year: 2024
Project Type: Professional, Made in Earth Collective
Team: Shruthi Ramakrishna (Partner), Jeremie Gaudin (Partner), Agnimitra Bachi (Partner), Kune Yatheesh, Rosna Saji, Nikhita Ramdas
Location: Male Mahadeshwara Hills, Karnataka
Exhibition: Milan Design Week


Lantana (Lantana camara), brought to India in the 1800s by the British as a charming ornamental plant, now tells a darker tale as one of the nation’s most formidable threats to biodiversity. Spreading unchecked across mountain ranges like the Western Ghats, it has endangered ecosystems and devastated nearly 40% of tiger habitats. NGOs like the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) are turning this menace into a means of livelihood, empowering villagers living near the forests to harvest lantana and transform it into intricate objects and furniture—breathing new life into what once seemed destructive.

Through ATREE’s intervention, we were able to bring lantana from the forests and craft this piece together with the Soligas and Bedagampana indigenous communities of MM hills. The lantana is cut and treated in tanks of boiling water, following which it is peeled and made ready for use by artisans and designers.

Having already explored Lantana as a building material, we knew going into this that the sticks would need a metal framework in order to hold shape and accentuate the contours of the human body. The first exercise in this process became finding the right body type and the developing a framework around it. For the first attempt, I used a LiDAR scanner to scan the torso of my colleague which I then imported into rhino and sectioned out the model to reveal a framework. Each member was then printed out to provide an outline for our metal fabricator Shamsuddin, to trace. With his technique of beating each metal strip into shape, we were able to develop the first prototype for the bust. This method however failed as it didn’t give us the accuracy and shape that we were looking for. The final framework was molded on a discarded fibre glass mannequin that we found at a mannequin factory in the industrial area of Bangalore. We upgraded from MS strips to MS rods which provided a more accurate contour.

Once the framework was ready ,the final piece was made by two members of the MM hills
community who bent the lantana into shape around the framework and used glue and metal ties to attach it together. The piece was also fired with a blowtorch to ensure that the bent lantana would
hold shape. The framework was then removed leaving us with the final bust.