Photo courtesy of the Fisher Center Communications Team
About
Cooking Sections examines the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop.
Their work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, SALT, Bonniers Konsthall, Lafayette Anticipations, Grand Union, Atlas Arts, Storefront for Art and Architecture; the Istanbul Biennial, Taipei Biennial, 58th Venice Biennale, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah Art Biennial, Performa17, Manifesta12, and New Orleans Triennial among others. They have been residents at Headlands Center for the Arts, California; and The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They are part of British Art Show 9. They lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London.
Cooking Sections were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. They were awarded the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and were nominated for the Visible Award for socially-engaged practices. Daniel is the recipient of the 2020 Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for Being Shellfish.
When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]]
Cooking Sections | Live Arts Bard Commission | North American Premiere
When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]] is a trilogy of performative installations tracing the effects of salmon farms on multiple ecologies. The three works focus on the impact of food production based on extractive systems that push the environment to the verge of collapse.
Shown for the first time in North America, the trilogy portrays farmed salmon as a constructed animal, one of the most recently domesticated and industrialized species in history. The first installation, Salmon: A Red Herring, questions what colors we expect in our ‘natural’ environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of color is changing as we change the planet. Salmon: Traces of Escapees, explores the environmental impact of salmon farms, which can be traced far beyond the circumference of open-net pens, and everything that escapes through them. The final chapter of the trilogy, Salmon: Feed Chains, subjects the audience to the automated feeding mechanism of the salmon farm. The piece revolves around the eco-systems that are transformed into feed, the landscapes that are fed to farmed fish and the pellets that are consumed by salmon in their feedlots.
Salmon: A Red Herring
Cooking Sections, 2020
Lecture Performance
When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]] opens with an exploration of the deceptive reality of salmon as a colour and as a fish. Salmon is usually thought of as pink. The colour is even called ‘salmon pink’. However, farmed salmon today would be grey. To make them the expected colour, synthetic pigment is added to their feed. The fish cannot be dyed in a standard pink tone, as it depends on how their bodies metabolise the chemical, and where they are to be shipped and sold. In Europe, market analysis shows that the preferred shade is ‘light-pink’ and so farmed salmon is coloured accordingly while in Japan, a darker pink is enjoyed more.
Salmon is the colour of a wild fish that is neither wild, nor fish, nor even salmon. But they are not alone. The changing colours of species around the planet are warning signs of an environmental crisis. Many of these alterations result from humans and animals ingesting and absorbing synthetic substances. Changes in flesh, scales, feathers, skin, leaves, or wings give us clues to environmental and metabolic transformations around us and inside us. Salmon: A Red Herring questions what colours we expect in our ‘natural’ environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of colour is changing as much as we are changing the planet.
Salmon: Traces Of Escapees
Cooking Sections, 2021
Performative installation, 17 min
Open-net salmon farms are made of holes, the key structure of these underwater feedlots. Nets prevent circulation between an inside and an outside, at least in theory. They separate and concentrate bodies in space. In circles, automated feeders spin, bodies twist, guts revolve. Through the holes, excrement, drugs, synthetic colour, and parasites billow out, polluting the surrounding waters. But even if the nets break, farmed salmon remain captive; they can no longer escape their own modified bodies.
This immersive film installation explores the environmental impact of salmon farms, which can be traced far beyond the circumference of open-net pens. Originally developed in Norway in the past decades, modern salmon companies have expanded globally into less saturated (and less environmentally restrictive) waters, ranging from Scotland to Chile, Canada or Australia. Salmon: Traces of Escapees is a recognition that nothing can be removed without leaving traces, no divestment can be disassociated from extractivism, and no domestication comes without the colonisation of the gut.
Salmon: Feed Chains
Cooking Sections, 2022
Performative installation, 20 min
Co-commissioned by Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Bard
To feed is to be in loop. The final chapter of the trilogy When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]] traces the landscapes consumed by the production of feed for salmon farms, which range from the anchovy-depleted waters of Peru, India, and Senegal to the krill-exhausted Arctic and Antarctic oceans, and the soy plantations in the deforested Amazon. Shaped as an automated feeder, a rotating arm activated when fish are hungry in salmon farms, the piece subjects the audience to the feeding mechanism in salmon farms that makes salmon swim round and round.
Salmon: Feed Chains revolves around the ecosystems that are transformed into feed, the landscapes that are fed to farmed fish and the pellets that are consumed by salmon in their pens. Pumped day and night outside human labour routines to pump up gains, the pellets are part of a sophisticated system to fake seasonal patterns of growth and rest. Feed is indeed displaced nutrients, extruded species, and exhausted spaces. Salmon are chained to their feed as much as millions of consumers worldwide are hooked to planetary flows of fish flesh.