VITALGREENHOUSE


VITALGREENHOUSE is a five-year, ERC-funded research initiative (2024–2029) that brings anthropological and ethnographic insight into the complex world of industrial greenhouse agriculture. From the nurseries of the Netherlands to the greenhouses of southern Spain, we investigate how growing practices, other than human dynamics, and technological systems intersect to shape food production in Europe.

By observing what happens inside the greenhouse, from seed to harvest, from human to insects, we aim to map the social, technological, and environmental entanglements that shape this sector. In Europe, greenhouses are under pressure to adapt to changing needs. The push to enhance horticultural productivity, coupled with concerns about land,  biodiversity loss, and chemical exposure, is challenging Europe’s traditional industrial production model.  The ERC-funded VITALGREENHOUSE project will apply ethnographic methods to investigate how scientists, growers, workers, and environmental groups enact various forms of sustainability. It will also develop an analytical framework that views sustainability as a relational practice, while also conceptualising greenhouses as vital landscapes.

Research
The Team
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Publications
Talks & Events
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    Talks & Events


    The interior Frontier: Industrialized Ecologies in Dutch Greenhouses by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.


    Keynote:     Planting the scene: packaged ecologies and new extensions of the grids
    Organisers:     Spiral Research Centre  
    Location:     Faculty of Architecture of the University of Liège
    Date:     May 20 2026


    https://www.spiral.uliege.be/cms/c_12909939/en/planting-the-scene


    Parte y no dueña: Ethics of Care and the Struggle to mitigate the Mar Menor ecological collapse by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.


    Keynote:     2026 Anthropology Day.
    Organisers:     The Association of Professional Anthropologists (ABv).
    Location:     World Museum, Leiden
    Date:     May 8 2026

    In this presentation, I focus on how feelings of pain and loss experienced firsthand by our interlocutors — as they witnessed the Mar Menor slowly suffocating  after an anoxic event— served as a driving force behind the social movement that culminated in the salty lagoon’s recognition of legal personhood in 2022. This social movement, activated in part by grief, gave rise to a distinctive ethics of care in which activists, gesturing toward multispecies kinship with the lagoon, developed a lexicon of material relationality. As Teresa Vicente, the scholar credited with drafting the legal proposal, once said: ‘A major ontological shift occurred among the residents living along the Mar Menor coastline, who went from feeling like masters to feeling part of the Mar Menor  (parte y no dueña).’ I argue that the ethics of care activists mobilise to relate to the Mar Menor is deeply material in its relationality. To develop this argument, I focus on two material objects or materialities: (1) water, and (2) sand. Dramatic yet deeply transformative, this catastrophic anoxic event turned the Mar Menor into a nodal point between life and death — a site of countless multispecies encounters, some tragic, others joyful.


    Accompaniment in collaboration: lessons from the laboratory model of ethnographic fieldwork by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.


    Workshop:     A multi modal workshop on kin-entanglements and Ethnography. Supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
    Organisers:     Elisa Lanari, Max Planck Institute; Andie Thompson, University of Amsterdam; Magdalena Suerbaum, University of Bielefield.
    Location:     University of Amsterdam (UvA), Anthropology department
    Date:     December 3-5 2025


    https://new.express.adobe.com/publishedV2/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:bbf180ad-5228-4666-a2e9-11d391123a36?category=search


    Salty Politics: Scientific bureaucracies, Irrigated agriculture, and the rights of nature in the Mar Menor by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín and Jorge Núñez (UvA).


    Workshop: Experimental Ethnography in the Anthropocene, a workshop with Kim Fortum (UC Irvine)
    Location: University of Amsterdam (UvA), Anthropology department
    Date: November 28 2025




    The Interior Frontier by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.


    Organisers: Aaron Zelensky, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society
    Location: UC Berkeley
    Date: April 25 2025




    Inside the Chemosphere by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.


    Location: USC Dornsife, Taper Hall 309
    Date: April 21 2025

    The horticultural greenhouse is a built infrastructure that reproduces a climate-controlled environment for plant growth. Beyond their political role, they are spaces of 'hope', as they allow crops to be grown in otherwise hostile environments - greenhouses not only model different ways of growing food, but also different approaches to working with plants.

    In this paper, I present a small ethnographic investigation in which I elaborate on how greenhouse cultivation gives rise to emergent toxic relationships between humans and plants.

    Dr. Rebeca Ibáñez Martín is an anthropologist specializing in critical food studies, environmental anthropology, and social studies of science (STS). She studied History and Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid and completed master's degrees in Feminist Critical Theory (Complutense University) and Social Studies of Science (University of Oviedo). She received her PhD in Philosophy of Science with "cum laude" distinction from the University of Salamanca, Spain (2014), where her dissertation "Bad to eat? Empirical Explorations of Fat as Food" was awarded the university's annual prize in Humanities and Arts.

    This program is open to all eligible individuals. USC operates all of its programs and activities consistent with the university’s Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation or any other prohibited factor.

    Hunger as a Weapon of War and Genocide by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín, Ayşenur Korkmaz and Solange Fontana.


    Location: SPUI25 Amsterdam
    Date: April 3 2025 

    Eighty years after the “Hunger Winter” claimed an estimated 20,000 lives in the western Netherlands, the deliberate use of starvation is again on the rise in global conflicts. Today, approximately 223 million people living in war-affected regions face hunger as a direct result of political decisions, military strategies, and state violence.

    Hunger is more than the absence of food: it is a moral, emotional, sensorial and deeply political experience. Drawing on cases from World War II, Gaza, Sudan and South Sudan, our expert panel will examine how starvation has been weaponised historically and how it continues to shape contemporary conflicts.

    Together, we will explore how hunger interacts with mass violence, forced displacement and genocide; how it relates to concepts such as the right to food, food sovereignty and international criminal law; and how its effects reverberate across societies and generations.

    This programme is organised in collaboration with the Amsterdam Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, the Meertens Institute Ethnology Department, and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

    https://www.spui25.nl/programma/hunger-as-a-weapon-of-war-and-genocide


    Screening: DESERT PHOSfate.


    Location: Framer, Framed
    Date: March 27 2025

    On 27 March, Framer Framed hosts a screening of the experimental documentary film DESERT PHOSfate by Sahrawi artist Mohamed Sleiman Labat. It explores the impact of phosphate mining on the Sahrawi community and is based on narratives and philosophies rooted in the Sahrawi way of living, honouring Indigenous storytelling. Following the screening, the artist will be present digitally for a conversation on the work. This public screening takes place in the context of the two-day workshop Raw Earth Agriculture hosted by Jeff Diamanti, Rebeca Ibáñez Martín and Florence Evans in collaboration with Framer Framed. The workshop invites critical interventions on two inputs into the agricultural supply chains feeding Western Europe that are often overlooked: phosphate fertilisers originating in the Western Sahara and migrant labor tending the greenhouse crops of southern Spain and the Netherlands. Centring the political ecology of industrial agriculture, the workshop includes film screenings and a field trip to the largest agribulk terminal in Europe (Amsterdam Bulk Terminal) as well as talks from artists, architects, and activist scholars across two days.

    https://framerframed.nl/en/projecten/screening-desert-phosfate/


    Raw Earth Agriculture: Supply Chain Criticism and the Political Cartographies of Food Workshop.


    Organisers: Jeff Diamanti (UvA), Rebeca Ibáñez Martin, and Florence Evans (UvA)
    Location: Framer, Framed
    Date: March 27-28 2025

    The EU wants to reduce European dependence on the import of rare earths and critical raw minerals. But instead of moving away from the logic of extraction intrinsic to the climate emergency, it aims at fast-tracking the growth and exploitation of new mining sites in Europe and its international map of influence. A new cartography of colonial extraction already marks the “energy transition,” on which the future of Europe’s political power depends.

    This two-day workshop focuses creative and critical attention on the agricultural corridor linking North Africa to Spain and The Netherlands. The program will involve scholars, artists, and activists from across the agricultural nexus.
    Workshop participants will explore how water, labor, and phosphorus (a key chemical for farming) are all connected. What role do these ecologies play in our economy, and how does capitalism rely on them? The participants will also try to understand where things go wrong and where people can work together in dealing with these important resources.

    The workshop consists of film screenings, talks, a mixed media installation at Framer Framed, and a field trip to the agribulk terminal of the Port of Amsterdam. Students at the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) Field Theory course are invited as participants and interlocutors, and the program is open to all members of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), as well as the wider public. 

    https://decolonialfutures.uva.nl/projects/2024/critical-raw-cartographies-workshop/raw-earth-agriculture-supply-chain-criticism-and-the-political-cartographies-of-food.html

    VITALGREENHOUSE Launch Event by the VITALGREENHOUSE Project Team. 

    Location: International Institute for Social History (IISH)
    Date: March 25 2025

    The Humanities Cluster hosts the launch event for the ERC project “Greenhouses as Vital Landscapes: Sustainability, Relationality, and the Future of Food” (VITALGREENHOUSE). 

    The project, “Greenhouses as Vital Landscapes: Sustainability, Relationality, and the Future of Food” (VITALGREENHOUSE), led by Meertens researcher Dr. Rebeca Ibáñez Martín, focuses on sustainability transitions in European horticultural greenhouses in relation to mobility, especially flows of migrant workers, the circulation of non-human entities, and technological interventions and innovations. The project asks the question: in what different, contradictory ways is the concept of sustainability conceived and put into practice in greenhouses?

    The conference will start with an introduction about the project and a keynote lecture by Manuel Tironi (Universidad Católica de Chile) about Soil Care, Local Knowledge, and the Limits of Agroecology. After the keynote there will be 4 sessions on the topics of industrial animal farming, foodscapes in the Netherlands, soil ecologies and legacies of plantations, and mobilities of labour and food. Read the full programme below.

    https://iisg.amsterdam/files/2025-03/VITALGREENHOUSE_Launch%20Conference.pdf


    Pensando a través del medio ambiente, desestabilizando las humanidades. El caso de la horticultura en invernaderos en los Países Bajos by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.

    Organisers: Juan Manuel Zaragoza, Philosophy department, U. Murcia
    Location:     EHCOLAB Universidad de Murcia
    Date: December 11 2024





    Caring for and with plants: Multispecies Collaborations in Dutch Greenhouse Horticulture.
    VetValues ERC Project Launch Conference by Fenna Smits and Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.



    Organisers: Else Vogel, UvA
    Location:     University of Amsterdam
    Date: October 24 2024


    Movilidades, toxicidad y plantas en los invernaderos hortícolas del sur de Holanda by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.



    Organisers: Gabriel Gatti (UPV/EHU) / María Martínez (UNED)
    Location: Universidad del País Vasco, Bilbao.
    Date: May 27-28 2024





    Movilidades, toxicidad y plantas en los invernaderos hortícolas del sur de Holanda by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.



    Organisers: Olatz González Abrisketa, Anthropology department.
    Location:     XI Encuentro Hacer Teoría con la distinción Naturaleza/Cultura
    Date: May 28 2024




    Vital Greenhouses: Labour (in)Mobilities and the Future of Food by Rebeca Ibáñez Martín.



    Workshop: Crops and their humans: Vegetal perspectives on agricultural mobilities

    Organisers: Hilal Alkan (LZMO) Hannah Pitt (Cardiff University)
    Location:     Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany
    Date: May 16-17 2024








    Last Updated 24.10.37
    @VITALGREENHOUSE 2026

    This project has received funding from the European Union’s ERC
    Starting under grant agreements # 101115557.