The exhibition
COOKING SECTIONS
18 October 2025 – March 2026
Cooking Sections’ first exhibition in Spain will present a series of works that trace the unexpected contours of human-made waves, clouds, shells, or tides. These material records can be read like the palm of your hand, revealing stories of desires and alliances, labour and dreams, histories of both past and present. Through phenomena such as offshore dredging, eroding estuaries, fish farming, soil acidification and rising sea levels, the exhibition uncovers the signs and signals of extractivism etched onto coastal lands. A new body of performative works will create sensorial connections across different landscapes, proposing a hopeful vision to reimagine possible futures.
The exhibition follows on from Reading Ocean Imprints, a workshop led by Cooking Sections in September 2024 that took place in Santander and the Nansa Valley in Cantabria. The programme explored the natural environment of Cantabria and analysed the traces that human activity leaves in the ecosystems through readings, improvisations and performative actions.
Cooking Sections was established by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe in London in 2013. Their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to trace landscapes in transformation, the spatial and metabolic legacies of extractivism. They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolise climate breakdownTheir 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 are Readers in Architecture and Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art, London; Principal Investigators at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA and 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.
