Episode 29: Cooking Sections

We are talking with Daniel Fernández Pascual from the London-based duo Cooking Sections. Together with Alon Schwabe, they use food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. In a broader sense, they examine the systems that organize the world, through food.

“A little bird turned salmon because it had eaten one of the feed pellets that they feed the farmed salmon. So, we started seeing color as a way to trace these environmental impacts.”

Their output manifest in a variety of media: using site-responsive installations, performance, and video. Cooking Sections offer a mode of cultural production that navigates the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics.

Episode Notes & Links

This episode includes additional questions by Sarp Renk Özer & Jing Yi.

Find more about Cooking Sections from https://www.cooking-sections.com/

CLIMAVORE is a long-term project that sets out to envision seasons of food production and consumption that react to man-induced climatic events and landscape alterations.

For hundreds of years, the wetlands north of Istanbul have been home to water Buffalo. Wallowland (Çamuralem) presents the outcomes of a series of metabolic surveys conducted at different times of the year. Buffalo kaymak, yoghurt, and sütlaç made from local producers are offered as tastings accompanied by field recordings and Buffalo songs aiming to enhance a cultural landscape on the verge of extinction. https://bienal.iksv.org/en/17b-artists/cooking-sections https://saltonline.org/en/2317/climavore-seasons-made-to-drift?q=cooking+sect%C4%B1ons 

The First Geography Congress (Turkish: Birinci Türk Coğrafya Kongresi), which was held in Ankara in 1941, separated Turkey into seven geographical regions, which are still used today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Geography_Congress,_Turkey

Salmon: A Red Herring was first exhibited at Art Now, Tate Britain. As part of the project, Tate removed farmed salmon from its menus across all four Tate sites and introduced CLIMAVORE dishes instead.

Set on the intertidal zone/seal-mara at Bayfield, CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones explores the environmental impact of intensive salmon aquaculture and reacts to the changing shores of Portree, Isle of Skye. 

Eyal Weizman is the director of the research agency Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, the University of London where he is a Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and a founding director there of the Centre for Research Architecture at the department of Visual Cultures. https://forensic-architecture.org/

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ingold 

Lüfer Koruma Timi was a campaign to protect the bluefish of the Bosphorus, urging fisherpeople, restaurants, and consumers to not fish, sell, or buy younger fish until the fish reaches its proper growth to reproduce. https://www.yesilist.com/tag/lufer-koruma-timi/

The Lionfish is an invasive marine species.

This season of Ahali Conversations is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The Graham provides project-based grants to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

This episode was also supported by a Moon & Stars Project Grant from the American Turkish Society.

This episode was recorded on Zoom on August 25th, 2021. 

Interview by Can Altay. Produced by Aslı Altay & Sarp Renk Özer. Music by Grup Ses.