This project examines the workspace through the figure of the desk—not as a static or neutral object, but as an active network of supply chains, labour, and energies. The desk is understood as a spatial threshold: a site where global systems converge yet appear as self-contained objects. Coffee serves as the lens through which this network is revealed. Ubiquitous in work culture, coffee mediates rituals of focus and productivity. Yet the coffee’s presence on the desk is stripped of the histories and infrastructures that enable it to arrive there. Corporate supply chains and brands like Starbucks, Illy, and Nestlé obscure these trajectories, allowing coffee to appear as a neutral stimulant rather than a commodity shaped by exploitation and global inequities.

To materialize hidden supply chains, I constructed a desk and used coffee grounds to draw a maze across its surface, reflecting the energies and labour that circulate through the workspace. This gesture transforms the desk from a flat plane into a spatial network, where what is visible—the cup, the laptop, the notebook—is only a fragment of what sustains it. The maze operates as a metaphor for perception: a field of partial visions that privileges what is directly in front of us while concealing the systems behind it. An accompanying video reflects upon our dependence on goods like coffee and the infrastructures that are hidden behind products marketed for consumption. The project uses the desk as a way to demand that we look beyond its surface and confront the global systems embedded in everyday work.