shadow circuits: field trip to the port of Rotterdam
Calling the curious! Artists, researchers, and local city dwellers are invited to a field trip to the Port of Rotterdam as part of our current exhibition shadow circuits.
Join us as we travel by foot, coach and boat through the largest globalised shipping and logistics hub in Europe. We will explore pollution and waste processing at the Maasvlakte beach, and wander through terminals handling cargo, dry bulk and petrochemicals. We will engage with the site with audio recorders, notes and shared discussion in order to learn more about how our resources circulate, and the political and environmental costs of globalization.
In collaboration with University of Amsterdam’s Political Ecologies: Supply Chain Criticism group, with researchers Jeff Diamanti and Miriam Matthiessen.
Limited tickets are available for €15 and include all travel.
Send an email to info@thisismama.nl to secure your spot!
This event is in English.
Program:
8:00 AM – Meet at Rotterdam Central Station for the bus ride to Portlantis
9:30 AM – 60-minute boat tour departing from Portlantis
10:45 AM – Bus tour
12:00 PM – Research walk and discussion with Miriam Matthieson and Ruby Reding on the Maasvlakte
1:30 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – Bus ride to the MaMA showroom
3:00 PM – Refreshments and guided tour of the exhibition by curator Ruby Reding
4:00 PM – End
Ruby has facilitated workshops in Rotterdam and London at Vrolijkheid in Leiden and Turf Projects including collaborative filmmaking, sculpture and poetics. From 2023–2024, Ruby was Research Assistant in the Fine Art department at Goldsmiths, University of London and previously worked in communications for the cultural sector. Ruby participated in Conditions Studios Programme in Croydon (2021–2022) and Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2023–2025).
Jeff Diamanti teaches Philosophy and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. For over a decade he has researched and written on logistical cartographies, energy infrastructure, and political ecology. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury 2021) tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. His new research, Bloom Ecologies, follows the mining of phosphorous in the occupied Western Sahara to the aquatic currents forcing algal bloom and hypoxic milieu all over the planet. He is also building a long-term research network on Supply Chain Criticism to document and evaluate the conflicts implied by the EUs Critical Raw Materials framework.
Miriam Matthiessen is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is currently working on an ethnographic research project about logistics, labour, and political ecology across the Rhine-Scheldt Delta. Drawing on field work aboard inland ships, at simulation centers, and remote navigation centers, her research examines how new shipping technologies re-organise the socio-spatial relations of river work between water and land. Her writing on maritime logistics has appeared in Urban Political Ecology, the Journal of Environmental Media, Sonic Acts, Weird Economies, and the Contested Ports Project. Since 2021, she co-runs the Abandoned Seafarer Map, and together with Jacob Bolton she is part of Liquid Time, a research duo working around shipping, finance, and the temporalities of maritime worlds.
