Waste4coffee
Founded in 2019 by Joana as a not-for-profit initiative, Waste4coffee exchanged beach trash for food and drink in partner cafés and restaurants. Participants collected a bucket of waste from the sand and, in return, received a coffee, juice, or ice cream — turning environmental care into a sensory act of pleasure.
Non-for-profit Environmental Initiative (2019)
The project gained media attention and fostered collaborations with national and international businesses, environmental organisations, and hundreds of volunteers. Although originally framed as activism, Waste4Coffee can now be understood as an early exploration of food and scent as agents of social transformation.
By using taste, smell, warmth, and sweetness as motivational dramaturgies, the initiative invited participants to experience activism through pleasure. This collapse between care and sensory satisfaction echoes the philosophical and feminist underpinnings that inform Joana’s current work: the politics of pleasure, embodied knowledge, and the elevation of “feminine-coded” senses — taste and smell — as forces for cultural change.
In retrospect, Waste4Coffee stands as an early iteration of methodologies that continue to shape the practice: activating space through sensorial rituals, reframing food as narrative, and transforming everyday gestures into collective, political experience.
