Speaker

Dinner Performance

Cooking Sections

London

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organise the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the US Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; 2016 Oslo Architecture Biennale; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York; dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; CA2M, Madrid; The New Institute, Rotterdam; UTS, Sydney; ETSAM, Madrid; TEDx Talks Madrid; Fiorucci Art Trust, London; ACC Weimar; SOS 4.8, Murcia; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; 2014 Biennale INTERIEUR Kortrijk; and they have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. In August 2016, they opened The Empire Remains Shop, a public installation that speculates on selling the remains of the British Empire back in London. Their writing has been published by Sternberg Press, Lars Müller, and in Volume Magazine, The Avery Review, The Forager and Displacements. They have lectured at UTS, Sydney; RMIT, Melbourne; ETSAM, Madrid; Alicante Architecture School; The Architectural Association, the Royal College of Art, the Bartlett and Goldsmiths, London.
www.cooking-sections.com
www.empireremains.net

Climavore Dinner

While the fossil fuel industry often seems like the worst perpetrator of climate change, the activity most rapidly transforming the planet is in fact the “misuse of land use”. Many studies have proven how eating less meat would have an unprecedented impact on the acceleration of climate change, but how do other food choices we make harm the landscape? How can we re-shape space through our eating habits? Citizens of the global north generally underestimate the direct impact of their dietary choices on the landscape, and especially on climate change. Local and organic foods are more marketable than ever, yet their impact on the environment is slow and possibly even negligible. If our eating habits have such a significant impact on climate change, then there is an urgent need to bring eaters and policy makers to the dining table.

CLIMAVORE is a performative dinner that aims to consider a diet based on new climatic seasons. Different from the now obsolete cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter, they react to current drought, desertification, water pollution, flash floods and invasion of species. These seasons offer a new set of clues about how to adapt our diet to the needs of global landscape. In a severe drought, eating tomatoes that are local and organic can still be environmentally destructive. Instead, CLIMAVORE aims to develop a diet that does not just “do no harm”, but uses diet as a means of rehabilitating and re-imagining agricultural production. Eating invasive species limits their population growth, eating nitrogen-fixing plants can restore the soil; one adult mussel can filter as much as 40 litres of water per day. The urgency to speculate about these new scenarios approaches food as an infrastructural means to rebuild environments.