In the vicinity of the southern Spanish tourist resorts along the Almería coastline, around 3.5 billion kilos of vegetables and fruit are grown each year. What does the world behind this largest greenhouse complex in Europe look like? This autumn at Kunsthal Rotterdam, the photographer Rob Hornstra and the author Arnold van Bruggen will show how countless migrants who have no legal residency status have to work under abominable circumstances to produce food for European markets. Their photographs and stories are part of the large-scale project The Europeans, in which Hornstra and Van Bruggen set out to capture contemporary Europe.
Both the exhibition Plastic Sea, Perfect Storm and the publication of the same name reveal how around 150 thousand people have to work six day working weeks under miserable conditions. As temperatures regularly rise above fifty degrees Celsius during the day,