Project information
Year
2026
Industry
Data Journalism
Services
Data Visualization
Investigative Research
Flight & OSINT Analysis
UX & UI
Web Development
Visit
Investigative Data Visualization
Origin Unknown follows the illegal gold of Venezuela's Amazon: where it is mined, how it leaves the country, and what it costs the land and the people.
Origin Unknown deals with the costs of the mining industry and its link to the social and environmental exploitation of Venezuela's land and people. Made in partnership with SOSOrinoco, a civil-society research and advocacy coalition documenting environmental destruction and human rights violations in the Venezuelan Amazon, the project focuses on a story yet to be reported at scale: how are the minerals behind Venezuela's illegal mining industry exported, and what are their impacts?
Once published, we got the opportunity to present the project to New York Times journalists. The website garnered thousands of views on it's first day, with press coverage in El Nacional, La Patilla, Correo del Caroní, Help Venezuela Org, and more. It was also discussed by Colombian Vice President José Manuel Restrepo on his podcast.
Origin Unknown studies the air traffic over the Orinoco Mining Arc by tracking flight data and flight transponders, from illegal landing strips to likely distribution networks, to find revealing patterns that can lead to immediate action. Moving between the micro and the macro, it aims for an immersive experience that holds both the granular detail this topic demands and the multinational reach of the story. Built on 36,581 flights, 1,234 aircraft and SOS Orinoco's mapping of 2,011 mining sites, with input from investigative journalists at Armando Info and the Pulitzer Center. Its central question is what has to become visible before the cost of extraction is too great, and how can change be incentivised?
The experience unfolds in three parts. The Mining Arc maps Venezuela's Orinoco Mining Arc layer by layer: the mines, the forest lost, the airstrips, the armed groups and the mercury. Gold Flows traces the flights out of the mining region, the aircraft that fly them, and the evidence, tier by tier, of which ones are tied to gold. The Real Price puts the gold market in numbers: a record price, Venezuela's mining boom, and what it costs.
Developed with Raul Romero within the Master in Design Engineering at Harvard University, September to October 2026.
El Nacional Newspaper
The platform determined shipments and processes linked to state management, destined for the Turkish market. They also identified logistics networks operated by independent actors, primarily targeting the United States and the Dominican Republic.
