Farmed salmon are a constructed animal, one of the most recently domesticated and industrialized 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 colors we expect in our ‘natural’ environment, it asks us to examine how our perception of color is changing as we are changing the planet.
Lectures are free and open to the public. This lecture will be held on Monday, October 17 at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. Registration required to attend in-person. Register here or watch the webcast on Youtube.
Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners. Their practice examines the systems that organize the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics.
Their work has been exhibited at Tate Britain; Serpentine Galleries; SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul; Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; 58th Venice Biennale; the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; 13th Shanghai Biennial; Prospect 5, New Orleans; 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennial and 13th Sharjah Biennial; Manifesta12, Palermo; Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University New York; Atlas Arts, Skye; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York among others. They hold a research position and lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London, and were guest professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.
They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates, for which they were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021, received the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and were the finalists at the Visible Award for socially engaged practices. Daniel is the recipient of the 2020 Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for the research project Being Shellfish.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Architecture at MIT.