Trans-Scalar Lecture: Cooking Sections
Monday, April 17, 2023
12:00 pm -
If you plan to attend virtually via Zoom, please register here.
When
[Salmon
Salmon
[Salmon]]
Farmed
salmon
are
a
constructed
animal,
one
of
the
most
recently
domesticated
and
industrialised
species
in
human
history.
In
this
performative-lecture
Cooking
Sections
reflect
on
their
expansive
body
of
work
on
the
environmental
impact
of
salmon
farms
which
can
be
traced
far
beyond
the
circumference
of
open-net
pens,
and
everything
that
escapes
through
them.
Salmon
farms
have
transformed
communities,
ecologies,
food
webs,
and
the
way
we
see
the
world.
Questioning what colours we expect in our ‘natural’ environment, it asks us to examine how our perception of colour is changing as we are changing the planet. Looking at different recent projects from Skye to New Orleans, they will present the role of oysters in alternative aquacultures, and how they have nourished human and nonhuman bodies for millennia. Like a modern palimpsest, oysters record time and events. Similar to tree rings, every season an oyster grows a shell around their lip. As the shell grows it encases the environmental conditions in which they live. Oysters tell stories about storms, hurricanes and droughts, the invention of dredgers, the expansion of cities; they also remember oil spills and gas leaks, and more recently, the effects of global pandemics. These material records are some of the witnesses that allow us to read our increasingly built environments.
Cooking Sections 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. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, 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, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Atlas Arts, HKW, Storefront for Art and Architecture; the Taipei Biennial, Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Cleveland Triennial, 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; and The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They are part of British Art Show 9. They lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London, and were guest professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. 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.
About
the
TRANS-SCALAR
Lecture
Series
Historically,
design
disciplines
have
been
attached
to
specific
scale
spectrums
-the
scales
of
Industrial
Design,
Interior
Architecture,
Architecture,
Urbanism,
or
Territory-
However,
the
objects
we
design
are
not
inert
assemblies
of
material
forms.
In
every
design
decision
we
make,
we
mobilize,
increase
pressure,
and
transform
the
Earth’s
system,
including
within
human
and
non-human
life
forms.
Every
design
decision
can
provoke
ecological
tension,
inequality,
and
disruptions
that
lead
the
planet
to
amplified
natural
catastrophes
for
which
no
one
can
quite
be
blamed.
Design
is
trans-scalar
if
we
realize
simple
equations:
every
pile
produces
a
whole,
and
every
material
form
has
its
equivalent
negative
somewhere
else.
How do we think and practice design ethically when acknowledging the objects we design are not innocent, but the intractability washes the responsibilities of natural catastrophe? The way of displaying the complex reality of design is by disclosing its trans-scalar powers. Objects of design are assemblages of many layers -the ecological, political, social, formal, material, technological, and environmental-combined in ethical and aesthetic forms. When these layers come together in exemplary works, they disseminate knowledge by becoming paradigms.
In this new era of ecological consciousness, design becomes an embassy, a cross-section, of all these layers representing the myriads of scales in which every design decision operates from the molecular to the cosmic scales. This program series posits the question of trans-scalar design via the social, cultural, historical, and environmental realms and how designers respond to the responsibilities of trans-scalar materiality.
