Cooking Sections - Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe - is a duo of spatial practitioners based in London. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, ecology, architecture and geopolitics.
August 31st, 2021 Cooking Sections will open a large-scale exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm. As a preparation for this exhibition Cooking Sections will spend the summer of 2020 in Sweden to conduct research that will lead towards the production of a new artwork.
Since 2016 Cooking Sections project CLIMAVORE has been tackling the detrimental effects of salmon farms in the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The first iteration consisted in a site-specific installation to gather cross-disciplinary knowledge and challenge the ways in which open-net fish farms are clearing the seabed and creating dead zones, while “performing nature.” Each day at high tide, the new structure on the tidal zone works as an underwater oyster table to activate filter feeders in the polluted shores of the island. At low tide, the structure emerges above the sea and functions as a dining table for humans, with tastings of ingredients that clean the water by breathing: seaweeds like kelp, carrageenan or dulse, and bivalves like oysters, clams, scallops and mussels.
Through a series of ongoing public workshops, the structure is activated in collaboration with local stakeholders, residents, schools, politicians and researchers. Aiming to divest away from salmon farming and develop a new cultural imaginary based on alternative aqua-cultures, a network of local restaurants has also been established as active agents in the process: each replaced farmed salmon with a CLIMAVORE dish.
The long-term project aims to look at other understandings of ecology and water monitoring to consolidate human and more-than-human inhabitation on the liminal space of the coast. Cooking Sections work at the tidal zone offers an opportunity for discussing the spatial construction of the ocean and its shores.