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Paper short abstract

Drawing on counter-mapping and sensory-material analysis of palm oil's circulation and processing, I show how logistics abstracts palm oil materially and infrastructurally, making it a “negative witness” to dispossession, exploitation, and environmental harm.

Paper long abstract

Tank farms and shipping ports are routinely targeted by activists as nodal sites for the circulation of palm oil, one of the most environmentally harmful commodities. Yet these logistical spaces show only fragments of the plantation economies they sustain, as the violence of agro-extraction gets concealed within anonymous architectures that render both production and circulation opaque.

This contribution examines palm oil circulation as an aesthetic and material regime of invisibility, where logistics does not merely move commodities but actively abstracts them. It follows palm oil as a sensory medium that reveals the (not-so-)hidden entanglements between matter and infrastructures. Drawing on a counter-mapping project tracing the supply chain ‘from plate to palm’, I show how data illegibility and the fragmentation of the chain are deliberately produced to conceal political and environmental violence, and to allow extractive economies to function seamlessly. Such an invisibility is also materially inscribed in the oil. Across crushing machines, pipelines, and processing tanks, industrial processes transform palm oil’s material properties, stripping it of colour, smell and variability, and stabilising it as a transparent and adaptable substance. In the process, palm oil becomes a “negative witness” to broader dynamics of colonial dispossession, labour exploitation, and environmental transformation. As such, I argue that invisibility does not concentrate in a logistical site — but it operates as a condition sustained across sites. By approaching logistics through counter-mapping and sensory analysis, this contribution advances anthropological debates on the aesthetics of logistics, showing how abstraction and invisibility are materially and infrastructurally produced.