Text by CLOT Magazine
Cooking Sections —established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe— examines the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance, and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics.
Their practice uses food as a lens and tool to observe landscapes in transformation. Their long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE explores how to eat as humans change climates and recognise that new ‘seasons’ emerge. The lines between spring, summer, autumn and winter are increasingly blurred, while periods of polluted oceans, soil exhaustion, subsidence, pandemics and droughts are becoming more prevalent.
As part of Back to Earth, CLIMAVORE collaborates with experts in ecology, marine biology, agronomy, nutrition, and engineering and proposes an adaptive form of eating, shifting, for instance, to drought-resistant crops in a period of water scarcity or filter feeders during times of polluted waters by fish farms. In addition, the collective will support a long-term process to help transform the food offered at cultural institutions across the UK into a menu that addresses the climate emergency. Becoming CLIMAVORE enables Serpentine to catalyse and transform people’s desires and habits, engaging society in a collective long-term process that will re-imagine existing food justice models and create new ones in the face of the climate emergency.
Launching on October 29 2021, the collaboration is part of Cooking Sections’ Turner Prize 2021 exhibition in Coventry. The first step in Becoming CLIMAVORE is to remove farmed salmon from menus. The second step sees Cooking Sections work to create new CLIMAVORE dishes in collaboration with Serpentine using filter-feeders and regenerative coastal ingredients that positively affect marine ecology and proactively respond to the ecological challenges along the UK shore. The restaurant’s site is at the core of Cooking Sections’ 2021 Turner Prize exhibition new installation.
