Helveta
Provenance
A project by:
Michael Conroy, Liam Hinshelwood, Eva Guerra, Nicholas O'Donnell-Hoare, Christopher Rea & Tom White
Helveta and Goldsmiths postgraduate design students have collaborated on a project entitled Provenance, which highlights the relationship between UK consumers, imported tropical hardwood timber and the indigenous communities whose livelihoods depend on the forests the timber is sourced from.
Helveta works around the world providing monitoring and tracking software solutions for timber, food and minerals. In one case their technology helps logging communities in Cameroon to gather and record data relating to their land use with the aim of helping them protect their rights and resources as well monitoring logging activity to help curb the illegal timber trade. A deeply ingrained and complex issue, illegal logging has implications far beyond that of environmental degradation. The relentless pursuit of this practice has led to social instability, trapping generations of communities into its myopic logic.
The Provenance team wanted to disclose network of the legal hardwood trade by linking consumers to the source of their hardwood products and highlighting the benefits of sustainable forestry both environmentally and socially. To achieve this they set themselves a brief to create a reciprocal relationship between consumers, producers and their respective ecosystems.
The lynch pin of this relationship became the care of bees. A keystone species, bees are responsible for pollinating huge amounts of plant life, from food crops here in the UK to tropical hardwood trees in Cameroon. The Provenance project offers two, twinned bee habitats using excess material from legally felled Cameroonian hardwoods; a beehive to remain in Cameroon and a bee house for use in Europe. These habitats are twined together using Helveta’s unique tracking systems and a smart phone application, creating a tangible link between the two objects.
The beehives would be distributed amongst Cameroonian communities’ dependant upon the legal timber trade through the purchase of bee houses in Europe. This reciprocal relationship offers great benefits to forestry workers through the supplementary income that honey provides, and by supporting bees this in turn increase the health of the ecosystem, which provides them with livelihoods. In Europe the bee houses will provide vital habitats for a variety of species of bees, which are in sharp decline. As well as supporting the local ecosystem they will also act as an aid to learn about the important role bees play in our lives and highlighting the importance of purchasing legally-felled timber.
A project by:
Michael Conroy, Liam Hinshelwood, Eva Guerra, Nicholas O'Donnell-Hoare, Christopher Rea & Tom White
Helveta and Goldsmiths postgraduate design students have collaborated on a project entitled Provenance, which highlights the relationship between UK consumers, imported tropical hardwood timber and the indigenous communities whose livelihoods depend on the forests the timber is sourced from.
Helveta works around the world providing monitoring and tracking software solutions for timber, food and minerals. In one case their technology helps logging communities in Cameroon to gather and record data relating to their land use with the aim of helping them protect their rights and resources as well monitoring logging activity to help curb the illegal timber trade. A deeply ingrained and complex issue, illegal logging has implications far beyond that of environmental degradation. The relentless pursuit of this practice has led to social instability, trapping generations of communities into its myopic logic.
The Provenance team wanted to disclose network of the legal hardwood trade by linking consumers to the source of their hardwood products and highlighting the benefits of sustainable forestry both environmentally and socially. To achieve this they set themselves a brief to create a reciprocal relationship between consumers, producers and their respective ecosystems.
The lynch pin of this relationship became the care of bees. A keystone species, bees are responsible for pollinating huge amounts of plant life, from food crops here in the UK to tropical hardwood trees in Cameroon. The Provenance project offers two, twinned bee habitats using excess material from legally felled Cameroonian hardwoods; a beehive to remain in Cameroon and a bee house for use in Europe. These habitats are twined together using Helveta’s unique tracking systems and a smart phone application, creating a tangible link between the two objects.
The beehives would be distributed amongst Cameroonian communities’ dependant upon the legal timber trade through the purchase of bee houses in Europe. This reciprocal relationship offers great benefits to forestry workers through the supplementary income that honey provides, and by supporting bees this in turn increase the health of the ecosystem, which provides them with livelihoods. In Europe the bee houses will provide vital habitats for a variety of species of bees, which are in sharp decline. As well as supporting the local ecosystem they will also act as an aid to learn about the important role bees play in our lives and highlighting the importance of purchasing legally-felled timber.
