Friends and sometime collaborators, curator Diana Campbell and architect Sumayya Vally are known for their work addressing people and culture beyond gallery walls. For Campbell, the long-serving artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, food is frequently a central factor in initiatives that spotlight histories and heritage. Projects that have seen her welcome artists, top chefs and everyday cooks to the table include Recipes for Broken Hearts, her inaugural edition of the Bukhara Biennial last year, and artist-hosted dinners and communal cooking projects at Hartwig Art Foundation in Amsterdam, where she’s Head of Global Initiatives. Next year her exhibition, Sweet, Sour, Power: The Voyage of the Fruit, at Bozar in Brussels, will include a collaboration with the Michelin starred chef Karen Torosyan.

Similarly, it was Vally’s sure feel for fertile, alternative sites of cultural exchange that first shot her to art-world fame: As the designer of London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2021 – the youngest architect to receive the commission – she took inspiration from city mosques as well as historic nightspots for Black musicians and emigres. This kind of vernacular culture sits comfortably alongside ancient customs, myth, and folklore in Campbell and Vally’s creative lexicons. When they worked together for Campbell’s 2023 edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, for instance, Vally channeled rainy-season rituals, with water-bearing women washing away her installation of clay vessels. Here these voracious lateral thinkers discuss their boundary-breaking approach.

Diana Campbell: Most of my creative projects involve people [beyond] the art world. I’m trying to pull life and being in the world into every professional project that comes my way. How do you feel about that?

Sumayya Vally: I think that there are two kinds of architecture. One is about having a particular style, regardless of where it is, [an architecture that says] ‘this is who I am and what I’m about.’ I think there is another form of architecture: about dialogue that involves listening, being with place, being involved and immersed with people, and then speaking. And when we do speak, it is imbued with everything that we have learned and absorbed from place. I aspire to listening in my work. And I find your practice so inspiring because you work across contexts seen as outside of the traditional art world. [Rather than] fitting a model of the art world into these geographies, [you’re] imagining different forms and formats from these places.

DC: I think time is really important. Commissioners want buildings, or biennales want projects to a timeline. But life doesn’t exist on those timelines. [With agriculture, for example,] things will only bloom in a certain season. Listening is also listening to nature, light, or moon cycles, understanding that the Gregorian calendar is a construct. There are many different ways of understanding your place in the universe, your place relative to someone else, relative to a community. Life is richer by understanding these different systems rather than imposing. I’m always looking to create these windows for another way of seeing.

SV: I was just thinking about the eclipse that we saw together in Sylhet, Bangladesh, in 2022. Our conversations subsequently have been about ritual in relation to time, harvest, and seasonal engagements around moon and sun cycles. I am wondering now if it is because we shared witnessing this incredible event. I often talk about finding architecture from our contexts, reading and writing in our mother tongues, listening to the moon, mist, dust, atmosphere – stories waiting to become architecture or form, become creative expression.

DC: The reason that food has come more into my practice recently is that it is the easiest way to convince someone who thinks they know everything about the world that perhaps there’s a part of that story they might be missing.

SV: Recipes, songs, stories, mythologies: We know that these are all important forms of archive, but they are genuinely generative in terms of how they pass knowledge on. Food is able to take on ingredients from different places, depending on where and how people migrated or what scarcities and abundances they went through.

DC: I want to excite someone to learn more. Learning is a lifelong exercise. This idea of expertise is dangerous. We should all be cultivating multiple expertise. We are both so lucky to be born in a time where we can get past these ideas of credentials – what and where you studied – and to birth new platforms where those credentials go aside and talent can grow and speak for itself.

SV: You worked on the Dhaka Art Summit and the inaugural Bukhara Biennial. I worked on the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale. It’s a great privilege to be an artistic director of a first edition because you get to imagine what the platform can be. But it’s also an incredible responsibility. So many people who came to the Islamic Arts Biennale couldn’t believe that there was no site there before, that everything was under construction.

DC: I think people sometimes miss how difficult it is to birth something. To actually start it from the beginning is an insane amount of work. I’d love to hear more about that process of giving birth to platforms, but also about these philosophies and principles that enable you to do that.

SV: A lot of my work and my projects involve honoring and preservation, but I’m trying to think about that in dynamic form, rather than keeping something closed in a glass box. Oftentimes, there is collaboration with the weather. If we think about the mud mosques of Djenné in Mali, for example, [where people come together to gather river mud for crépissage, a ritual replastering of the Great Mosque, the largest mud-brick structure in the world, at the beginning of the rainy season], everybody in the community has a role to play. The rain is part of the architecture. The same process happens every year. Arguably, the building is the same, but it’s also remade every single year. That is one form of evolving archive.

DC: We both love that idea that a building that can be rained down on and be rebuilt is architecture. Something you and I really have in common is that we don’t just think that art is painting, sculpture, photography, or that architecture is a monument that’s meant to last forever.