Image: Kunsthal, Rotterdam
Kunsthal Rotterdam will present ‘Plastic Sea, Perfect Storm’, a photo-and-text project by photographer Rob Hornstra and author Arnold van Bruggen, in Hall 3 from 3 October 2026 to 7 March 2027. The exhibition concerns migrants without legal residency status working in food production around Almería, in southern Spain.
The project takes up the vast greenhouse region near the Almería coastline, where, Kunsthal says, around 3.5 billion kilos of fruit and vegetables are grown annually for European markets. The exhibition and a publication of the same name describe a workforce of approximately 150,000 people working six-day weeks under miserable conditions. With daytime temperatures regularly exceeding 50 degrees Celsius, migrants are often forced to work at night, according to the exhibition’s account.
Hornstra and van Bruggen’s photographs and stories are part of ‘The Europeans’, their larger project portraying contemporary Europe. Here, the pair focus on people whose lives usually remain hidden from public view. Their subjects live among plastic greenhouses, often in self-built shacks constructed from discarded pallets.
Plastic is a central fact of the landscape described by the project. Kunsthal links the agricultural industry to around 6 billion kilos of plastic waste each year, much of it ending up in illegal dumping grounds; it identifies 400 such sites across southern Spain. Waste materials drift across the plains and become part of the landscape.
The exhibition brings Hornstra’s photography together with van Bruggen’s writing to portray migrant lives in the Almería region, where the fruit and vegetables grown in the greenhouse complex reach supermarkets across Europe, including the Netherlands.
