Dock of the Depot with the Engine House (Barcelona). © Maritime Museum of Barcelona
Activity
Friday, 3 July 2026
From Dock to Dish: The Kitchen School with Mabel Llevat, Papalaye Seck and Alba Aguilera
Route to discover the colonial history of the port, traditional fishing and communal afternoon snack
finished
To end the first semester of The Kitchen School, we propose a walk from Drassanes to the Moll de Pescadors [Fishermen’s Dock], to explore the connections between food, fishing and port facilities. We’ll go into the historical, political and social aspects of the sea and the fish that arrives on our table.
It will be an evening devoted to port facilities. We’ll go from micro to macro: from the traceability of fish to the physical infrastructure, politics and history related to it. Because, if we eat fish – or we want our establishments to carry on using it – we need to ask ourselves what this involves and how we can consume it in line with criteria of social and climate justice.
Since the consolidation of nation states and European colonial expansion, control of territories, food and natural resources has been at the heart of the modern capitalist project. This logic lives on today in ports, trade routes, international agreements and unequal access to resources. The case of Senegal helps us to understand how structural adjustment plans, extractivism and unequal fishing treaties have weakened a trade that is essential to many coastal communities. The pressure of major industrial fleets and over-exploitation of marine resources have led to the depletion of local fisheries and left many families without a means of making a living.
This change affects not just food, but also ways of working, local economies and migratory processes. First came the internal migrations, then the international ones. This is why many people today seen as migrants and nothing else come from communities that historically lived from fishing. Meanwhile, traditional fishing in Catalonia is also in a critical position, under pressure from a model that concentrates resources, markets and infrastructures in a few hands.
To talk about all this we will have three very special guests: Mabel Llevat, with whom we will walk from the Colom statue to the Moll dels Pescadors to discover Barcelona’s colonial and port history; Papalaye Seck, a traditional fisherman from Senegal, spokesman of the Sindicat Popular de Venedors Ambulants, the street seller’s union, and founder of the project “Mi sueño no era ser mantero, soy pescador” [My dream wasn’t to be a street seller, I’m a fisherman”]; and Alba Aguilera, the youngest traditional fisher in Catalonia, who will be telling us about the current position of fishing in this country.
We’ll finish off the day by sharing a small fishermen’s afternoon snack to bid our school project farewell until we meet again in October.
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this activity is part of
participants
Alba Aguilera 
Mabel Llevat 
Marina Monsonís with the support of
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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