Cooking Sections, Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe, will direct in Santander, from 9 to 17 September, 2024 a workshop under the title Reading Ocean Imprints.
Organised by Fundación Botín, Reading Ocean Imprints is a workshop led by Cooking Sections that will trace signs and signals of extractivism in a scarred planet.
How do surfers read waves to find swell? What do clouds tell fishers to catch? Can cockle pickers read shells to foresee the tides? From the first cloud seeding experiments for intensive agriculture to the appearance of new fog or disappearance of waves following the construction of dams and ports, this gathering will use reading, visits to key sites and the experiences of professionals and experts as a performative method for orientation in degrading landscapes. As palimpsests resembling tree rings, waves, clouds, shells, and tides can be read as the palm of your hand. They are material records to tell us about desires and alliances; about histories, past and present, of offshore dredging, air pollutants, acidification, and sea level rise…
Over the course of ten days, participants will immerse themselves in inland and nearshore discussions, guest readings, improvisation, and performative reenactments decentering the role of humans along metabolic pathways.
The workshop is linked to the exhibition Cooking Sections will present in 2025 at Centro Botín in Santander, under the curatorship of Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz.
Cooking Sections is formed by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe. Established in London in 2013, 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, Carnegie Museum of Art, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Atlas Arts, HKW, SPACES, Storefront for Art and Architecture; the Taipei Biennial, 58th Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Cleveland Triennial, BAS9, Shanghai Biennial, Los Angeles Public Art Triennial, 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; Fogo Island Arts; and The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They were guest professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich in 2020-21. They are Senior Research Fellows and Principal Investigators at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the Royal College of Art, London. Since 2023 they are also Fellows at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. 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.
