BUREAU OF OPERATIONAL LANDSCAPES
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The Bureau of Operational Landscapes examines sites that shape our lives but remain overlooked: places like ports, extraction zones, and agro-industrial complexes. Using landscape photography as its starting point, The Bureau initiates overlooks, tours, and site-specific encounters to engage the public with operational spaces. 

Our mission is to assist the public to read the land and expand its narratives, intervening in the official story. The Bureau invites a closer relationship to the infrastructures that surrounds us, revealing their impact on our environment and daily lives.

The Bureau of Operational Landscapes examines sites that shape our lives but remain overlooked: places like ports, extraction zones, and agro-industrial complexes. Using landscape photography as its starting point, The Bureau initiates overlooks, tours, and site-specific encounters to engage the public with operational spaces.



MISSION ONE: PARK MAASVLAKTE The Bureau undertakes missions—site-based interventions that reframe operational landscapes. Its first mission unfolds at the periphery of the Port of Rotterdam’s otherworldly Maasvlakte terminal, reimagining how this vast, engineered space can be seen, understood, and experienced.

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    BUREAUCRATIC VISION Logistical landscapes exist to grease the flow of capital, not to be observed. Their scale makes them nearly impossible to ignore, yet access is restricted, and perspectives are controlled. 

    Bureaucratic Vision is the official gaze of logistics—an image of efficiency, inevitability, and control, carefully framed to manage perception and maintain distance. It presents a seamless operation while concealing the labour, infrastructures, and systems that sustain it. 




      TOPOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPH The Topographic Photograph is an image-making method that treats logistics not as a spectacle, but as a system. It adopts tools of mapping and recording, though with results that are less precise. The process exposes gaps, disruptions, and contradictions within a landscape designed to appear seamless.

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        PARK MAASVLAKTE: LEARN ABOUT OUR GUIDED TOUR
        The Port of Rotterdam is built for circulation, not visitors. But with the Bureau as your guide, you’ll step inside this logistical landscape and move beyond its official story. 

        Book a tour and you’ll experience Maasvlakte through site-based encounters, overlooked perspectives, and unexpected narratives.

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