'Seaweed Extraction and Building Culture in the Making of Landscape: the case of Sargaço and Gelidium in the North and South of Portugal' | Daniel Duarte Pereira (University of Minho)
The research on seaweed as a resource reveals numerous links between marine ecosystems and the built environment. Seaweed has been harvested as an agricultural fertiliser in Portugal since the XIV century. Sargaço, the biomass of various types of seaweed harvested, has been an important resource for nurturing the arid soil of the Portuguese coast and the development of specific agricultural systems built over dune areas known as Masseiras. More recently, since the 1940s, the discovery of laboratory-grade agar-agar in Gelidium corneaum, a type of red seaweed found on the southern Portuguese coast, fueled the development of a Portuguese agar processing industry between the 1960s and 1970s.
In my presentation, I will reveal the work I've been developing as part of my ongoing Ph.D. research, which aims to shift the analysis of the built environment away from solely anthropic and urbanisation narratives and toward others that place the history of marine ecosystems, namely Sargaço and Gelidium corneaum, at the centre of the discourse.
This study is based on the broader goals of the research group "Fishing Architecture" (Lab2PT / CIIMAR, Portugal), which is made up of marine biologists and architects. fishingarchitecture.com/
Supervising team: André Tavares (FAUP), Marta Labastida (EAAD), Fabio Vanin (VUB)
A lunch will be offered by Cosmopolis. Please register if you want to join! If you are not able to join in person, you can follow the presentation online. Register to receive the meeting link.
Daniel Duarte Pereira (Johannesburg, 1987) is an architect by the School of Architecture of the University of Minho, Guimarães (2011), where he has worked as an invited assistant, research scholar and is currently developing his PhD co-supervised by the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels. Besides his academic work, he has collaborated in the production of several architectural books and exhibitions. He is also co-founder of Space Transcribers, an NGO that designs socially-engaged projects related to architecture, city and territory.