THE LOGISTICS OF FISH AND CORK
The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies, 2025
Studio: Project Global
Site: Portugal
The Logistics of Fish and Cork is an academic design-research project that addresses the spatial, ecological, and infrastructural implications of global supply chains between Portugal and broader European and Atlantic networks.
Through fieldwork, diagrammatic analysis, drawing, and documentary filmmaking, the project brings together the logistics of fish and cork as interconnected resource systems embedded in landscapes of extraction, production, and distribution. The research traces how these materials move across multiple scales, from marine ecologies and coastal infrastructures to processing sites, ports, and global trade routes, and how these flows reshape both natural environments and built territories.
Within the project, individual work focused on the ecological and spatial conditions of fish populations, including research into scale, materiality, and marine systems, as well as the development of the Kelp Campaigns, which explore kelp cultivation as an alternative ecological and productive landscape.
The project also includes a documentary film, Punching and Canning, developed as part of the research process, documenting field observations, material conditions, and infrastructural landscapes on site. The film functions as an integral research tool, translating spatial and ecological relations into a narrative and observational form.
The work examines how logistics operate as spatial systems that are simultaneously visible and hidden, and how design can critically engage with the infrastructures that organise contemporary resource extraction and distribution.
The outcome takes the form of a combined research and design project, consisting of analytical drawings, ecological studies, speculative design proposals, and an accompanying documentary film, reinterpreting logistics landscapes as sites of ecological and spatial transformation.
This project is created in cooperation with Britt de Schoenmakere, Claire Demeyere, Eleni Magnisali, Imane Amzil, Gabi Stabile and Yingxin Zhang.
Teaching Team: Benjamin Groothuijse, Juan Benavides, Salomon Frausto and Sanne van den Breemer.