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Interview with Cooking Sections

Salmon A Red Herring, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022(1).jpg
David Silva Revés

Cooking Sections is a duo established in 2013 in London by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe. Food is at the core of their critical, research, educational, and artistic work, as a methodology to evaluate global economic, political, and social systems and as a means to face human-caused climate changes. In 2021 they were nominated for the Turner Prize, and in 2019 they received the Special Prize part of the Future Generation Art Prize. Undamming Rivers, at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, is their largest solo show to date. In the context of this exhibition, Contemporânea interviewed the duo about their intersectional practice, which is deeply engaged in proposing new possible futures and ecological ways of relationship with the world we live in.

 

 

 

David Silva Revés (DSR): I would like us to start by addressing what led you to create Cooking Sections. As far as I know, you both have a background in architecture. Daniel also studied urban design, and Alon has a background in theatre and performance. How have these influenced your coming together as a duo, and how do they influence your practice?

 

 

Cooking Sections (CS): We met at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths almost 11 years ago. The spirit of this Centre is to bring different disciplines together while approaching different themes or research questions from the different angles, skills, and toolsets of each of their members. Then we began working on a project with three other colleagues in Kivalina, Alaska, and there we thought there was a greater potential to expand that kind of work by looking at food as a lens or a tool that can be used to trace different forms of construction of landscapes or different kinds of economic structures and political regimes around which some of these foodstuffs circulate. Our practice is a combination of an interest in space [how the space is built, unbuilt, or destroyed] and an interest in using different tools to address it that sometimes are more performative, or can have moving images, for instance, to create different narratives and reimagine other possible futures. We think that every project, in a way, is a combination of all these different methods.

 

 

DSR: As we can guess from the name of your duo, food is at the core of your work. However, the question you ask is not so much "What do we eat?" but rather "How do we eat and what does it entail?" More than actual foods, you are interested in studying and critically evaluating the relationships of food in a planetary, globally interconnected world that is still too anthropocentric. Can you elaborate on these interests and lines of force that shape your work?

 

 

CS: Food comes from the way we are starting a project. Food is not so much the subject of our practice, as you say; in a way, it is the methodology, or a certain lens through which we look at the world and try to understand how different landscapes are being transformed by different kind of practices—mostly addressing the legacies of extractivism, imperialism, colonialism, and so forth. It’s very much from these frictions that our working methodology has developed and evolved over the past decade. To that extent, even though many times we depart from a subject matter we focus on [impact of fish farming, boundary conflicts, climatic changes, etc.], we use it as a way to speak about a series of larger spatial constructions that constitute those issues or pertain to some of the main challenges we see today in contemporary societies. That’s how most our projects operate, and that, of course, is something that has been evolving. On one hand, there’s an attempt to speak about larger questions; on the other hand, there’s a number of actions to think about food as a way to transform these spaces or create more equitable spaces.

 

 

DSR: Your projects, in addition to their material component, also have a strong educational and, I would say, propaedeutic dimension. For this end, you invite other agents from varied fields to work with you. Could you tell me a little more about these relations that you try to establish and the rhizomatic ways of thinking that you aim to activate?

 

 

CS: Yes. For us, that is quite important, for many reasons. The first of them is to open up questions around space, not just for students or non-students, but for everyone. We do it by raising or asking questions that are also questions for us. We enjoy doing it, and it also becomes part of our work in different ways. Take as an example the work we have been doing on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. We started a project there where we set up different apprenticeship programmes with the local schools and also the local college, because we thought that there would be a certain need for engaging with younger generations if we wanted to move away from fish farming by using more seaweeds or bivalves. So, it was not just about bringing back traditional recipes or traditions but also about how to reconnect younger people with the future of the coast. To achieve that, we thought it would be a good idea to set up these apprenticeship programmes and workshops, and then connect the students graduating from them with restaurants where they could put some of those ideas to practice. In addition to it, we collaborated to develop a new curriculum for the material course for professional builders to experiment with different building techniques where we could use materials from intertidal origin. This was a different way of engaging with the pedagogical framework for our purposes, from the moment we thought there was a need to provide more training in different directions, if we really wanted to advance new forms of living with the coast that otherwise would take years. It is not something that happens right away; it is a whole process.

 

DSR: And, if I understand correctly, you also ask researchers and agents from other fields to work with you, right?

 

CS: Yes. For us, that is important because we lack a lot of the knowledge or expertise that allows us to look into the questions we are interested in. So, every time we do a project, we try to collaborate with people that are already doing field work, in order to allow our work to amplify things and experiment with other formats. So, yes, we collaborate and have conversations with lots of biologists, scientists, farmers, fisherfolk, and many more, and through that we try to test out new ideas. Since we work in a cross-sectional way outside the space of cultural production, i.e. art, it has been also very important for us to think about how we open up a specific space from or for all those different collaborations that shape new forms of living, for both humans and more-than-humans.

 

 

DSR: Your trajectory is not confined to the contemporary art circuit. Quite the contrary, you seek to activate relationships with the territories and local communities you work with, developing site-specific projects that aim to transform their particular contexts. You also maintain strong connections with the academic world and conduct research, having delivered lectures in a number of international venues. Tell me more about this form of expanded thinking, and about your perception of your work in contexts that sometimes might be potentially conflictual or have very different material consequences: let's say, the inside and the outside of the museum.

 

 

CS: Our work tries to engage and influence different spaces, so we are always thinking about how we set up new audiences and make all those conversations available. In that regard, we believe that the role of the cultural institution, i.e. the role of the museum, is twofold. On the one hand, museums are really important because they are amplifiers of ideas and can generate a lot of mediatic noise through exciting debates, even in their very specific, sometimes limiting sphere. In the same way, museums have become the spaces that create conversations and controversies that perhaps are very disproportional to their actual pace or to their role in the economy. For us, it is interesting to explore and see how we can use these spaces of cultural production in line with how we are trying to generate new knowledge. On the other hand, our cultural institutions rarely have the tools to explore the urgent need not only to reflect on ecological questions but to take action on and face the environmental breakdown. When artists or other practitioners are invited to do a project in a museum or any other cultural institution, you usually get a slot for an exhibition for like two or three months, right? And, if you are lucky, you get an invitation two years in advance, which is already a generous amount of time. But how can we start thinking about and practicing an ecological time? How can we start projects that last decades within institutions? That tension is really important for us: a living archive, a process of cultural conservation that does not come to a halt after the exhibition closes. We try to use the power the cultural institution has to ensure they support the kind of work we think is urgent today.

 

 

DSR: To some extent, you are trying to shape the institution from the inside with your work.

 

CS: We try!

 

 

 

DSR: Still on the "inside and outside of the museum," as well as "the inside and outside of the institution," and taking into consideration the mechanisms of actual world transformation that any artistic project might activate, I would like you to talk about your ongoing project Becoming CLIMAVORE. Beyond all the critical perspectives you seek to establish in your work and the way they reveal invisible, perverse realities in the contemporary world, it seems to me that it is precisely through this project that you manage to create immediate transformative consequences.

 

CS: We started this ongoing project as a campaign for the Serpentine Galleries after Tate removed salmon from their museum menus. We were invited to do an environmental campaign for the Serpentine’s 50th anniversary. We wanted to work with different museums to bring more people on board. In most museums, the food business is separate from the content, which is a total pity, and it is often at odds with their actual program on so many levels, from labour practices to the ingredients. It made total sense for the Serpentine to start Becoming CLIMAVORE, together with a number of museums all over the country. We wanted to think about this idea of becoming, not being, because we don’t see CLIMAVORE as a certifying body of organic labels, but rather as a process in which we are constantly trying to figure out what makes sense, while being aware of which and how the seasons are constantly changing. There’s no single recipe for the next 50 years of this project, and it won’t stay the way it is. It must keep evolving, constantly testing out what is possible and what makes sense. We also think that the idea behind “becoming” is also the fact that we need to move to a place where our involvement/engagement with ecology is always shifting and responding to the realities we are faced with. We want people and institutions to align themselves and be attuned to the fact that ecology is dynamic, and we need to develop the tools to see these changes while responding to them in real time. In the end, this project aims to take people and institutions on a certain journey that enables them to transform their practices and the way they are engaging with all of the spaces and scales involved in food production.

 

It’s a way of putting in motion a certain kind of lasting ethics, something more than an ordinary programme that only happens once, or one in a fixed, closed form…

 

 

DSR: Moving to my next question: Undamming Rivers, on view at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, is your largest solo exhibition to date. It includes previously displayed works and new works made especially for the occasion. Quoting the exhibition text, the show "takes salmon as the common thread, to focus on the impact of food and energy production based on extractive systems that push the environment to the verge of collapse." I would like you to contextualise this project, the beginning of it and the premises that drive it, as well as the way you've brought it into the Swedish context and related it to the research developed in this country.

 

 

CS: Bonniers Konsthall invited us to do this show almost four years ago, based on the research we had been doing on the environmental impact of salmon aquaculture. The work sees farming this fish as a landscape-consuming practice. Departing from how synthetic colours fed to industrialised animals travel through different bodies, we have been looking into the relationship between rivers and wild salmon and how fish farms affect it. These problems go beyond the open-net boundaries of salmon farms.

For the project in Sweden, we began doing research into industrial forestry, which is a hugely controversial topic, even though we are used to seeing Sweden as a country committed to some sort of "green forestry." However, monoculture timber plantations occupy almost 70 percent of the Swedish territory. When we started talking with local experts to understand how that affects wild salmon, it became clear that almost all Swedish rivers have so many human-made barriers and obstacles that salmon can't go upstream to spawn, mainly due to hydropower dams. At this point, we realised that, before talking about the relationship between trees and wild salmon, and their nutrient-based metabolic exchanges, we first needed to look at the barriers that prevent salmon from arriving upstream. That was what allowed us to expand the whole research context.

We found out that Swedish hydropower companies, the ones that also developed salmon breeding programs and hatcheries in the country, are responsible for it. Even if they don’t own farms per se as in Norway or Scotland, they have built hatcheries right next to the hydropower dams where they release hundreds of thousands of juvenile salmon every year to "compensate" for the loss of the salmon that cannot swim upstream.

These were the different takes of the story we found interesting to talk about, also because they relate to the current debate on energy and on what renewable energy is meant to be, especially after greenwashing talks about NetZero [which is never zero] have become more prevalent.

We thought this was also a call for action: what would it take to undam rivers, not only for the sake of salmon but also to rethink energy systems and ecosystems at large? For this, we started meeting a lot of people who have been working on this front in Sweden for decades, fighting to remove hydropower dams that are either obsolete or barely generating any energy. The ultimate collective goal is to free these rivers from the barriers of modernity.

DSR: Let’s now address the whole scenic apparatus. In the first room, we find ourselves before an almost operatic theatrical diorama which leaves us somehow attached to the scenes we witness. We then head to a corridor where various projections simulate salmon-feeding tanks and inside which we feel inebriated by the images and a constant vertigo, due to their circular movement. In the penultimate room, we are faced with a gigantic device that makes us feel like we are the salmon being fed. All these devices are meticulously crafted to render us "captive." These are extremely clever moves, for they reverse normal expectations while triggering sensitive relationships. But, at the same time, there is also a spectacular aesthetic effect and, I would say, a certain beauty in all of this, which I find a little conflicting with all the realities that your work seeks to critically assess. I would like to know your thoughts about this.

 

 

CS: That’s right! The structure of the exhibition revolves around the transition from something that we look at to something we slowly submerge into, which slowly captivates our entire body.

In the last chapter of the show, the audience becomes part of the installation and is forced to follow the "feeder speaker," listening to this kind of narrative about animal feed and other landscape-consuming practices.

This is something that we developed over more than two years, bearing in mind the harsh realities that salmon are subjected to. We wanted the audience itself to be subjected to the process of moving through the three chapters of the exhibition: colour, holes, and automated feed. We think that the logic of the farm emerges there, as does what happens to the farmed bodies of domesticated animals on such an industrial scale.

At the same time, in terms of the aesthetic component, we would not see it so much as a contradiction. It is more like a device with which we can lure people, just like the salmon industry uses this idea of pink salmon colour to create an object of desire.

For us, talking about how this local mechanism and this global infrastructure are constructed while subjecting the audience to it was a way to think about how we move through all these spaces and scales. How do we flow through all these questions? Perhaps it could have been done in a much more bare-bones way, but it wouldn’t have achieved the same result. There is a long tradition of environmental campaigns for animal welfare that use this idea of shock as a way to create a very strong reaction from the public. We think that, in this show, we tried to take it a bit to a different place where it’s not only about the facts, but also about how our senses are being manipulated, as much as fish are being manipulated.

So, again, to bring back the question of working inside and outside the museum, we believe it is crucial to use the tools of the museum and understand this idea of spectacle in order to be able to act within that and expose the way that industry works.

 

Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(1)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(10)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(11)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(12)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(2)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(22)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(23)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(24)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(25)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(27)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(28)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(3)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(4)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(5)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(6)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(7)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(8)
Salmon Traces of Escapees, Undamming Rivers, Cooking Sections, Bonniers Kunsthall, Stockholm, 2022.Photo Jean Baptiste Beranger(9)

 

DSR: The politics of colour is a result of the action of human design and of a predatory economic system that denies freedom to the bodies it seeks to control; the evil consequences of the action of humans terraforming the planet; the borders between the domestic and the wild, the artificial and the natural. Your exhibition goes through all these relationships, and the possibility [or impossibility] of a horizontal relationship between humans and the world is what is really at stake. Do you think this is possible? Bearing in mind that the human is also a product of constant and long-lasting artificialisation [technical, cultural, symbolic, etc.]...

 

 

CS: Perhaps as a continuation of the previous points, for us, this idea of colour was almost a way to start thinking about the new colours of the climate emergency and how we humans also need to develop new ways of seeing accordingly. We see all these faulty and fabricated colours as red flags or warning signals that do not correspond to what we think should be there.

Then, the way we trace back all these interconnected systems, humans, non-humans, logistics, infrastructures, and so on, indicates a new form of aesthetics that we perhaps need to learn in order to figure out how to navigate the world we are living in. Perhaps that assemblage of forces and relationships becomes more apparent through these colour variations.

So, it’s not so much about the possibility or impossibility of the relationship, because it is what it is—sometimes more horizontal, sometimes more vertical/hierarchical. We see it as something much more fluid: all these chemicals flow through bodies as much as bodies flow through chemicals. This is the world we are part of, and it configures our blood, cells, and skin.

 

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DSR: To conclude, in your practice, there is always a [fertile!] tension between the local and the global/planetary dimensions, between the particular and the universal, positing small alterations to transform the whole in an almost cosmological way, I would say. I would like to know your thoughts about these relationships, and whether you think this is the only way we can imagine alternative futures.

 

 

CS: Yes, definitely. Once again, going back to these questions about how space is constructed and used and how food is something that ties together all living bodies and organisms on the planet, we were very much “forced,” in a sense, to think about all of these different scales. In many ways, there is no other possibility. To use Gabrielle Hecht's term, what she calls “interscalar vehicle” is something that has become central to our practice due to the need to move from microscopic to planetary scales, and everything in-between. As we do that, we try to ask how we can hold everything together on so many levels. That is something that has become part of our working methodology and is very much central to our pedagogical practice as well. When we think about a project, whether it's an exhibition or something like Becoming CLIMAVORE, we try to understand how it can work on multiple scales at the same time. For instance, in Skye: you can’t understand Skye without understanding how people are consuming tonnes of farmed salmon in London, Lisbon, or Paris at the expense of depleted lands and waters worldwide. All of these spaces are tightly connected. In our work, we seek to understand which infrastructures and forces enable that, because they need to be dismantled—and time is running out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cooking Sections

 

 

 

 

Bonniers Konsthall

 

 

 

 

 

David Revés [Lisboa, 1992]. Independent researcher and curator. Master in Art Studies, Theory and Criticism of Art, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto [2018]. He has explored the area of new media and social networks, being interested in his intersections with art, museology, exhibition systems and issues related to the figure of the spectator. Develops a critical and essayistic practice with which he regularly contributes to some publications, artistic or academic projects.

 

Proofread: Diogo Montenegro.

 

 

 

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Cooking Sections, Undamming Rivers, 2022. Photography: Jean-Baptiste Béranger. Courtesy Bonniers Konsthall.

 

 

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