Stepping off the northbound Parisian RER at Garges–Sarcelles, one enters a world of scent and sound.
The nutty aroma of roasted corn drifts through the air, softening the midday sun like a veiled landscape in a Renaissance painting. Wigs sway atop weary mannequins; plastic jewellery glints in unruly piles; rows of lotions, beauty products, and fantastical hair treatments promise impossibly cascading locks.
The nutty aroma of roasted corn drifts through the air, softening the midday sun like a veiled landscape in a Renaissance painting. Wigs sway atop weary mannequins; plastic jewellery glints in unruly piles; rows of lotions, beauty products, and fantastical hair treatments promise impossibly cascading locks.
The Sarcelles market stretches a kilometre along Avenue Frédéric-Joliot-Curie, pressed against the neighbourhood’s sandstone housing blocks. Three times a week, thousands of shoppers weave between stalls, bargaining as rhythmic music leaks from tinny speakers. “Un euro, un euro, un euro,” vendors call in an auctioneer’s refrain. Food sellers thread through the crowd with baskets of nightshades, bags of spices, and unlabelled bottles of tapioca flour. Fish stare blankly from frozen displays, witnesses to it all.
Calories now arrive in our shopping bags from every corner of the globe, forged in the heat and pressure of the Haber–Bosch process and powered by fossil fuels. Modern food systems are inseparable from the energy regimes that sustain them.
But to understand food and the body, we must think in terms of flows. Caloric flows shape ways of life through diet, and diets have long ordered both bodies and societies. In fourth-century BCE Attica, classical medicine placed diaita at the centre of health. For Hippocrates, balanced eating was both prevention and cure: the first physician was also the first cook. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us, diaita joined food (sitos) with activity (ponos), regulating intake while training the body to adapt. It carried a political meaning as well—judgement responsive to circumstance rather than fixed law—and named an entire way of life, later preserved in its Latin heir, regimen. At the level of the “regime,” Agamben argues, biological and political life remain indeterminate.
But to understand food and the body, we must think in terms of flows. Caloric flows shape ways of life through diet, and diets have long ordered both bodies and societies. In fourth-century BCE Attica, classical medicine placed diaita at the centre of health. For Hippocrates, balanced eating was both prevention and cure: the first physician was also the first cook. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us, diaita joined food (sitos) with activity (ponos), regulating intake while training the body to adapt. It carried a political meaning as well—judgement responsive to circumstance rather than fixed law—and named an entire way of life, later preserved in its Latin heir, regimen. At the level of the “regime,” Agamben argues, biological and political life remain indeterminate.
The market makes the political dimension of digestion visible. Before Sarcelles, there was Les Halles. For nearly a thousand years, Paris’s central market linked countryside, state, and citizens, channeling food from farm to body. Les Halles served as a barometer of urban governance, securing the crown by keeping Parisians fed.
The Grand Hiver of 1709—when rivers froze, roads vanished under snow, and even stored bread and drink turned solid—exposed the fragility of this balance. Famine and cold followed, and, in the decades that followed, the state turned its gaze to reserves. The Halle au Blé, completed in 1763, staged an image of abundance, if only in appearance. Bread was political, and the administration under Louis XV knew that Paris could not be allowed to run out of it.
In the modern nation-state, desire became standardised, and bodies were coordinated alongside other instruments of control. Architecture was central to this project, organising foodscapes that sustained life while regulating conduct. Under Napoleon III, Les Halles were unified in the 1850s into iron-and-glass pavilions that embodied state ambitions for hygiene and morality, achieved through the management of air, water, gas, and food flows—and bodies. Control over productivity moved through architecture, from isolated buildings to the regulation of the commercial environment as a whole.
In the twentieth century, this logic culminated in the relocation of the wholesale market to Rungis in 1969. The Marché d’Intérêt National de Paris–Rungis bound calories to global infrastructure and secured low food prices relative to wages, enabling an economy increasingly oriented toward mobility and leisure. As Meredith TenHoor notes, rationality, transparency, and controlled distribution were elevated as instruments of security and growth, demonstrating how aesthetic and technical ideals shaped territorial, alimentary, and economic planning—and how state infrastructure could transform both land and bodies.
The caloric infrastructure of Les Halles is gone. The iron-and-glass pavilions of the Second Empire were demolished in 1971, an act many Parisians experienced as a public aggression, leaving a gaping void at the city’s centre—the Trou des Halles. Yet markets still punctuate Paris and its banlieue, from Rungis to Sarcelles, each with its own rhythms. In Sarcelles, women in bright dresses gather with babies on their backs and toddlers at their sides. Fried corn crackles in repurposed shopping carts; small bags of ground starch change hands. A slow vehicle appears, blue uniforms inside, lights pulsing. Sellers scatter, dissolving into the crowd, leaving only a brief puff of sand.
By day’s end, blowers chase scraps and debris, vendors fold stalls under blue tarps, and refuse lorries arrive, swallowing the remains and animating the dusk.
Until the nineteenth century, Paris circulated nutrients between city and countryside. Market gardeners cultivated land nearby and returned human excrement to the fields. After the 1860s, sewers broke this cycle. Nutrients were flushed away, and by the 1920s recovery had collapsed. The Seine became a sink for a fractured metabolism.
Until the nineteenth century, Paris circulated nutrients between city and countryside. Market gardeners cultivated land nearby and returned human excrement to the fields. After the 1860s, sewers broke this cycle. Nutrients were flushed away, and by the 1920s recovery had collapsed. The Seine became a sink for a fractured metabolism.
Today, crops draw nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium from soils, but humans absorb only a fraction; the remainder is flushed into sewers, diverted to the wrong places. Fields are depleted while rivers and coasts are fertilised instead, triggering algal blooms, killing fish, and collapsing marshes.
As night falls, blinding halogens blaze from furniture shops, illuminating monstrously curving sofas behind plate glass. Behind them, the sky fades from orange to deep blue. At the station, Paris-bound trains arrive one by one, collecting market-goers rushing south, hopping off just before the tunnel into the walled capital, plastic bags and trolleys heavy with the day’s goods.
At the end of the train line a quiet town bears daily witness to a relentless dance of destruction.
A deep growl rumbles through the afternoon air, vibrating through bodies and resonating beneath the ground.
It’s the roar of the Liebherr — laboring like a mechanical beast, relentless yet obedient, tamed under command.
The Liebherr’s iron claw lunges, tearing into the remains of walls and tangled debris, dismantling the world piece by piece.
Slabs of concrete crash to the ground, twisted rods of iron screech in protest, metal sheets fold like paper, and grimy layers of insulation tumble down in slow motion.
Through the low hum of combustion engines, punctuated by sudden clinks of breaking material and the clatter of falling debris, the Liebherrs call to one another.
Their stuttering beeps set the rhythm of the scene, each one a warning, as the hulking machines creep back and forth.
At times, the mechanical beast pauses, as if to gather its breath. It hisses — a sound like something subterranean and ancient, a serpent that rarely sees the sun.
It’s as if it has emerged from the depths of the earth, momentarily subdued, steam curling from its nostrils, savoring the scent of its next target, insatiable in its hunger for destruction.
Once, the Baltic was so clear sailors steered by reefs beneath the surface. In the shallows drifted tufts of green—Cladophora glomerata, “Ahti’s beard,” recalling the sea god and his consort Vellamo. Once a shelter for life, these strands now warn of imbalance.
The Baltic is a threshold, a shifting membrane of the North. Land rose, boundaries moved, and its present life is less than 4,000 years old. Shallow, brackish, enclosed — the sea remains unsettled.
Bearded stones remember the age of ice and water, when the earth trembled beneath retreating giants. Glaciers carved valleys, and floods tore across continents.
In their wake came shifting seas: the Baltic Ice Lake high above today’s waters; the Yoldia Sea, when the ocean broke through; the Ancylus Lake, sealed by rising land; and the brackish Littorina Sea, alive with periwinkles. Long before, the Eemian Sea had drowned Finland’s shores, teeming with life now forgotten.
Now, the sea lies clouded. Divine green beards thicken, flourishing in poisoned waters, warning of something darker. Each summer, mats of cyanobacteria spread, fed by rivers, fields, and cities—Anabaena, Aphanizomenon, Nodularia—names that unravel worlds.
Now, the sea lies clouded. Divine green beards thicken, flourishing in poisoned waters, warning of something darker. Each summer, mats of cyanobacteria spread, fed by rivers, fields, and cities—Anabaena, Aphanizomenon, Nodularia—names that unravel worlds.
The Baltic renews slowly, its waters turning only in decades. Nutrients linger, choking the sea. Blooms smother bladderwrack and deplete oxygen. Shores grow slick, meadows vanish, toxins seep outward. At times, the sea shifts through strange colors—red, green, brown.
Once a giver of life, the bloom now suffocates.
Once a giver of life, the bloom now suffocates.
Ella Kaira (b. 1992)
ella.kaira (at) gmail.com
I am an architect and co-founder of the community-driven architectural practice Vokal. My work moves within the existing city, where I seek out local knowledge and inherited traditions to care for modern architectural heritage. My practice makes visible the processes that shape the built environment, opening them to public dialogue.
Education
Aalto University (FI)
Architect M.Sc.
2014-2020
ENSA Paris-Belleville (FR)
Architecture
2018-2019
Vapaa Taidekoulu / Free Art School (FI)
Painting studies
2012-2013
Project Review: Echoes of the Past
The Finnish Architectural Review 4/2025
Architecture of Stewardship
Arvinius & Orfeus Publishing
2025
Ed. Ella Kaira & Matti Jänkälä
Promise of vitality
Archinfo
09/01/2024
Revisit: Vuoranta Training Centre
The Finnish Architectural Review 5/2023
The Local Community Heals
The Finnish Architectural Review
3/2023
Social Movements, Saviours of Built Heritage?
The Finnish Architectural Review
1/2023
Ella Kaira & Matti Jänkälä
Residencies
Institutum Romanum Finlandiae
Rome (IT)
2026 (upcoming)
Cité internationale des arts
Paris (FR)
2025-2026
The Finnish Cultural Institute in New York
New York City (USA)
2023
Muistojen Meri-Rastila
Kulttuuritila Merirasti
Helsinki, Finland
Matti Jänkälä & Ella Kaira
2025
The Pavilion - Architecture of Stewardship
Biennale Architettura di Venezia
Venice, Italy
Curators Ella Kaira & Matti Jänkälä
Commissioner Archinfo
Video artist Merle Karp
Sound designer Jussi Hertz
Exhibition Architect Antti Auvinen
Graphic designer Samuli Saarinen
2025
It’s Time to Talk about Monstrosities
Pori Biennale - Visitors
Helsinki, Finland
Matti Jänkälä, Ella Kaira & You Tell Me Collective
2022