Climavore: On Tidal Zones

7 dec 2019

On December 7th at 5-7 pm the artist duo Cooking Sections will make a performance lecture at Bonniers Konsthall. The event marks the beginning of an extended collaboration that will culminate in an extensive exhibition in the fall of 2021.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) explore how to eat as humans change climate and investigates how to adapt our diet and food infrastructure to new man-made seasons. Rather than thinking of carnivore, omnivore, locavore, vegetarian or vegan diet, they are proposing climavore as a form of eating following climatic transformations.

On this occasion the artists presents CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones, a performative lecture followed by a meal where the participant is welcome to taste oysters, a bivalve that can clean the water by breathing. The oysters are served raw and grilled and will be accompanied by oyster Bloody Mary drinks!

Get tickets here.

Cooking Sections

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based in London. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics.

CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones

Since 2016 Cooking Sections project CLIMAVORE has been tackling the detrimental effects of salmon farms in the Isle of Skye, Scotland. The first iteration consisted in a site-specific installation to gather cross-disciplinary knowledge and challenge the ways in which open-net fish farms are clearing the seabed and creating dead zones, while “performing nature.” Each day at high tide, the new structure on the tidal zone works as an underwater oyster table to activate filter feeders in the polluted shores of the island. At low tide, the structure emerges above the sea and functions as a dining table for humans, with tastings of ingredients that clean the water by breathing: seaweeds like kelp, carrageenan or dulse, and bivalves like oysters, clams, scallops and mussels.

Through a series of ongoing public workshops, the structure is activated in collaboration with local stakeholders, residents, schools, politicians and researchers. Aiming to divest away from salmon farming and develop a new cultural imaginary based on alternative aqua-cultures, a network of local restaurants has also been established as active agents in the process: each replaced farmed salmon with a CLIMAVORE dish.

The long-term project aims to look at other understandings of ecology and water monitoring to consolidate human and more-than-human inhabitation on the liminal space of the coast. This performative lecture looks at the tidal zone as a space of opportunity for discussing the spatial construction of the ocean and its shores.

Image: Isle of Skye, 2019. Photo: Nicholas Middleton