“We met an oyster farmer in New Orleans who told us he could read the coast with his hands. At the time, we didn’t understand what it meant.” Thus begins the story of Oyster Readingsone of the projects by the artistic duo Cooking Sections, formed by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, based in London. “The farmer explained to us that he knows the oyster reefs underwater because, when he dives, he touches them with his hands and thanks to that he can tell where the coastline was in previous years.” It turns out that oyster shells are like tree rings, “by looking at them you can read the present, the past and also the future.”
Oyster Readings perfectly exemplifies the ethos of Cooking Sections, which uses food as a lens through which to examine the systems that organize the world. “We use food as a starting point, a research tool. “We track ingredients to understand different global or local conflicts.” Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe met at Goldsmiths University and began working together in 2013. Fernández’s background has to do with architecture and urban planning, while Schwabe comes from theater and performance.
Next November 17 they will arrive in Madrid with their Ágora Climávora, a program of meetings that will take place at La Casa Encendida to think about alternative ways of eating that help mitigate the climate disaster and imagine a different future. A dozen international experts who work in fields such as agriculture, biology, journalism, ecological justice, feminism or anti-racism will pass by there. This Agora is part of one of his longest-running projects, Climavore. They began developing it in 2015, when they wondered about the “new seasons” that are appearing around us. “When you go to a supermarket you find the same products all year round. The seasons are becoming more erratic, but what kind of periods are starting to appear in the wake of the Anthropocene? What would it mean to adapt the food system to a season of drought, to one of polluted sea, to one of floods or to one in which the soil is no longer fertile?”
Climavore is adopting various forms depending on where they are invited to develop it. In Scotland, for example, they are working with residents of the islands of Skye and Raasay to replace farmed salmon on their menus with foods such as mussels, oysters or seaweed, which help oxygenate and regenerate sea water. They have managed to get their restaurants to reintroduce dishes with these ingredients, which have been traditional there for centuries, and they have developed a recipe book and training programs for new “climavorous” chefs.
Salmon is one of the topics that has been worked on the most in recent years. “Some activists told us that there had appeared in Glasgow a pink sparrow and no one knew why”. One of the theories about the change in plumage color was that the bird could have ingested feed from a salmon farm, which contains a dye to make the fish pink instead of gray, the color it has when it is raised. in a fish farm. “In the end, this story about salmon’s ‘identity crisis’ was what led us to ask questions about the industrialization of fish and how the environmental crisis is also an aesthetic crisis. There are new colors in the Anthropocene and we have to learn to see them to understand the deficiencies of the food system.”
They believe that food cannot be disconnected from politics, because the entire infrastructure depends completely on it. “That angle has always been key for us, to understand those very complex processes of how food is distributed, how shortages or profit margins are generated.” Your 2019 project Becoming Xerophile, in which they proposed a menu with plants that grow in the desert, raises the possibility of a future in which we look for food in unexplored places and include in our diet products that until now would not have even crossed our minds. “Although in reality, you don’t have to go that far, you just have to investigate a little where each one is. Some friends from Greece told us that there had been a loss of interest in the carob tree, because it was considered animal food. But it has been seen that the nutritional value of carob flour is super high, it has a lot of protein and the trees also resist drought. Anywhere, when you start talking to people, there are things that have always been there and it is more a problem of the industrialized system, which has left them aside because they were not economically interesting or because they were not efficient enough to obtain more benefit. That is what must be rescued.”
The journey of its projects over time is another of the distinctive characteristics of Cooking Sections. “We are interested in finding ways to continue conversations beyond the exhibition or biennial format.” The alliances they forge are, in fact, one of the factors that most contribute to this happening. They collaborate with city councils, cultural centers, institutes, but also with academia, scientists or contemporary art museums. They are strong advocates of different disciplines transcending their limitations to work together.
Language, for its part, acquires a special dimension in the work of this duo, whether by rethinking terms such as “native” or “invader”, which we frequently use without paying attention to their colonial connotations, or through word games. . Her project Mussel Beachdeveloped in Los Angeles, began with the joke that “mussel” (mussel) and “muscle” (muscle) are homophonous words. “We set out to look at the environmental history of the California coast and rethink it through the lens of bodybuilders’ muscles, which is what it’s famous for. Muscle Beach, but also of the entire population of mussels that has been disappearing due to oil extraction and contamination of the city’s water.” The resulting project was multi-layered, including the development of a terrazzo-like material made from mussel shells or a sports audio guide that described exercises through the mollusks’ point of view.
Cooking Sections has just returned from Rome, where they celebrated a massive Climate Assembly, which sought to strengthen ties between cultural institutions, communities and farmers as transformative agents capable of instigating changes in food systems. Among their projects for 2024 is the one they are going to develop for the IHME Helsinki around the “bread of the future”. “This is a contest to invent a bread recipe that is nutritious for humans, but also for the earth. The ingredients have to fulfill the function of feeding the soil instead of leaving it infertile.” An invitation that could be extended to the rest of the world and recipes, because the future of our diet depends on us not forgetting to also nourish the planet.
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