Ni un hogar sin lumbre, ni una familia sin pan
Almería, Spain.
2016-22
Not a home without a fire, not a familly without bread.
The “Sea of Plastic” is the name by which this area of Almería, in southeastern Spain, is popularly known due to the vast expansion of plastic greenhouses that cover the territory. Vegetables are produced here out of season for export to northern European countries in a model of intensive agriculture which causes serious environmental and human harm.
I started this project with an interest in knowing the villages that are in the middle of this network, created in the 1950s by Franco's dictatorship in a place which until then had been a sparsely populated desert. With the boom of the agroindustry in the 1990s, migrant workers came to live in the region from countries such as Guinea Bissau, Mali or Morocco, giving a new life and making these small villages grow. Despite being the driving force of this industry and living closely with its facilities and its waste, there is a phenomenon of residential segregation that maintains a physical and mental wall of separation between the places where migrant workers' communities reside and those where the white population does.