Tacapae grows from this land and its ancient cultivars, from a landscape where every tree is a record of resilience, grafting, and regeneration.

We learned from the troglodyte homes of Matmata: forms carved into the earth as attunements - courtyards cut for shade, walls formed from excavation, life oriented around a central void. Rather than imitate these dwellings, we studied their deeper teachings: excavation as climate device, shade as social technology, the ground as a communal table. Tacapae translates these gestures into a constellation of lightly carved rooms and openings calibrated to sun, wind, and the slow temporality of agriculture.

At its centre is the harvest table—a long, porous and shifting surface where olives are sorted, conversations gathered, and works-in-progress shared. It is part tool, part ritual, part offering. Around it, shaded voids and earthen chambers form micro-climates tuned to the farm’s rhythms: pressing, pruning, grafting, fermenting, resting.

Our research on the olive’s intelligences—its capacity to survive through grafting, to grow in companionship, to hold centuries of drought and abundance in its rings—inflects the project. Tacapae treats the olive as teacher: each space is oriented to the grove, responding to how the trees cast shade, how their roots hold water, how their branches choreograph the wind.

This is a land-architecture, born from soil, and agricultural ritual. It invites artists to dwell slowly, to work with clay, fibre, salt, and fruit; to gather with the community; to observe how the ground keeps time.