species · mautak
Melocanna baccifera
ninety-eight percent of mizoram's bamboo is mautak. flowers once every 48–50 years — the current thingtam cycle began in 2024–25.
Mautak is the backbone of mizo material life and the acoustic subject of the studio’s current research. Its fibres pulp cleanly for paper, its shoots ferment into mautuai, and its culms carry roofs, fences, and furniture across the state.
The dominance is the opportunity and the risk. When a single species covers ninety-eight percent of a forest, its flowering is everyone’s problem — the rats that follow the seed, the crops that fail, the livelihoods that bend. Species diversification is the obvious intervention; recording the acoustic and material properties of mautak itself is the less obvious one.