Origin — Woven Studio

INTRODUCTION

The chocolate food system is about to collapse, not due to a single disruption but by a network of interconnected pressures, which will skyrocket prices. Its unraveling makes visible the broader tensions shaping global food production.

For most consumers, these shifts appear only as a higher price tag on a familiar product. Yet behind that moment lies a complex system that absorbs stress quietly and out of sight, until the effects can no longer be contained. Chocolate becomes one of the earliest points where these accumulated pressures break through to the surface, revealing vulnerabilities that extend far beyond a single crop or industry.

This project uses chocolate not because it is unique, but because it is relatable, an everyday product through which deeper systemic strain becomes legible. By tracing global disruptions back to the living organism at their origin, the work reframes the collapse not as a distant abstraction but as a process that is already unfolding in real time.

Origin positions this moment of instability as an opportunity: a chance to understand how food systems function, how they fail, and how these failures quietly shape daily life long before they reach the supermarket shelf.

CREDITS

Commissioned by
Bailuwan Town

Artistic Lead
Thijs Biersteker

Architect
Junya Ishigami

Science Collaboration
ICCRI

Production
Woven Studio

THE MUSEUM

Architect Junya Ishigami designed the Zaishui Art Museum as a near-invisible line across the water, a structure that dissolves the boundary between building and landscape by allowing wind, light, and weather to move freely through it.

His philosophy treats architecture as a living system rather than a fixed form. Origin fits seamlessly into this vision. The installation brings the invisible rhythm of a distant cacao tree into the museum, allowing environmental changes thousands of kilometres away to subtly shape the atmosphere within the space, echoing the museum’s own sensitivity to its environment. It extends the building’s sensitivity beyond its physical site, linking the museum to the ecological realities that underlie the foods people encounter just outside its doors. In Ishigami’s gentle giant, the artwork becomes not just a guest but part of the building’s ongoing dialogue with nature.

THE EXPERIENCE

Sensors connect a cacao tree in Indonesia to its digital counterpart in the Zaishui Art Museum in China, reconnecting people to the origin of their food through a direct link between cultivation and consumption.

At the ICCRI plantation in Java, sensors track sap flow, moisture, temperature, and CO₂, generating thousands of data points each second. This information travels more than 4,500 km in just 0.2 seconds, animating a sculptural system inside the museum that reflects the tree’s changing state. The artwork shows in real time how the cacao tree in Indonesia drinks, grows, and suffers from environmental changes.

When it rains in Indonesia, the sculpture brightens as the tree draws in moisture. When the air quality shifts, the patterns change. During heat stress, its movements slow down, revealing the strain. What would typically remain hidden inside the physiology of a plant becomes tangible through light and motion.

By turning environmental stress into a real-time sensory experience, the installation reconnects people to the ecological realities that sustain their daily lives. It narrows the distance, physical and conceptual, between chocolate consumption and the ecosystems that make it possible.

The result is a direct link between two distant environments, allowing visitors to perceive climate pressure as something immediate rather than abstract. By translating the tree’s responses into light and motion, the work makes visible the quiet negotiations a living organism undertakes as conditions change around it.

This science-based artwork sets out to inspire greater awareness of the cocoa supply chain’s vulnerability, reconnecting people to the origins of their food and highlighting the importance of every link within it.

Studio Director
Sophie de Krom

Electronics
Bart Kallenbach

Software
Nik Zad (YFX Lab)

Technical Lead
Ian Considine

Recycled 3D Printing
The New Raw

MATERIALISATION

The sculpture is crafted from recycled 3D-printed plastics and shaped through hand-thermoforming into its final form. Its material choices reflect both the environmental focus of the work and the architectural principles of Junya Ishigami, who often explores lightness, transparency, and coexistence with natural systems.

A Material Passport accompanies the installation, detailing the sustainable components and outlining how the entire piece can be responsibly dismantled and recycled.

Transparent recycled plastics were selected to parallel the project’s intention: to bring transparency to systems that are usually hidden from view. The structure is produced using advanced robotic 3D-printing techniques, followed by thermal hand-sculpting to create a unique fusion of robotic precision and human touch

Light moves through the sculpture in response to real-time data from the sensors mounted on the cacao tree in Java. The monitored metrics - sap flow, moisture, temperature, and CO₂ - give the sculpture its behaviour, allowing it to shift continuously with the tree’s changing state.

The result is a material system shaped by both technology and ecology, an object that responds, adapts, and reveals rather than remaining fixed. Through this integration of recycled material, environmental sensing, and responsive form, Origin becomes a physical interface between ecological processes and architectural space, exposing the vulnerability embedded in the earliest stages of our food systems.

  
    Recycled 3D printed plastics
  
    Forestry climate sensors
  
    LED cacao pods created using recycled 3D-printed plastics
  
    Round low-energy LED screen
  
    AI, TouchDesigner and custom code
  
    Recycled steel structure

THE IMPACT

Origin seeks to broaden understanding of how global food systems function, and how easily those systems can be destabilized by pressures that remain largely invisible in everyday life. By connecting the behaviour of a single cacao tree to a sculptural presence inside the museum, the work creates conditions for a more direct relationship with the ecological realities that underpin familiar products.

The installation does not prescribe solutions. Instead, it offers a framework for recognition: a way for visitors to perceive the interconnected forces, climatic, economic, biological, and political, that shape the foods they encounter daily. In making these forces visible, the work encourages a shift from viewing supply chains as distant abstractions to seeing them as living systems dependent on balance and resilience.

This heightened visibility can prompt new conversations across disciplines, from agriculture and policy to culture and consumption. By situating global instability within the experience of a single organism, Origin allows audiences to approach complex issues with clarity and immediacy rather than overwhelm.

In this way, the artwork aims to contribute to a broader cultural understanding of planetary health: not through alarm, but through connection, insight, and a deeper awareness of the fragile infrastructures that sustain us.

  
    EXHIBITIONS
  
    Zhaishui Art Museum (CN), 2024 (permanent installation)

SCIENTIFIC INSIGHT

What appears to be a straightforward price increase is, in reality, the cumulative effect of pressures that reinforce one another: crop diseases intensified by heat, droughts that weaken trees, fertilizer shortages that deepen vulnerability, new deforestation laws reshaping supply routes, ethical sourcing requirements raising production costs, unstable currencies, labor scarcity, speculative trading, and steadily rising global demand.

For example: a fertilizer shortage can lead to crop disease, which reduces yields and pushes prices higher. Then, speculation companies hold back supply, waiting for prices to rise even more, creating an artificial shortage. One disruption accelerates the next, moving through the chain with a momentum that is difficult to interrupt.

Cocoa-producing regions in West Africa, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia are under persistent pressure. Even so, chocolate continues to appear on shelves with a sense of normalcy. The price rise surprises us because the system’s fragility remains concealed behind the familiarity of the product.

Origin brings this hidden complexity to the surface, not through abstraction but through the physiology of a single cacao tree. By making environmental stress visible in real time, the work reframes a global challenge as something immediate, embodied, and impossible to ignore.

With special thanks to
Theo Rekelhof, Madelief Broekman, Nathan Pottier, Robin Vrugt, Cécile Garcia, Dejan Borisavljevic

Images
Thijs Biersteker and Zaishui Art Museum

Video
Thijs Biersteker