Cooking Sections investigates the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism. Using site-responsive installations, performances, and video, their practice confronts the overlapping boundaries of art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics.
Founded in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections uses food as both a lens and a tool to trace the metabolic relations behind industrialised food systems. Since 2015, they have run CLIMAVORE, a long-term, site-responsive project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolise climate breakdown. In 2016, they opened ‘The Empire Remains Shop’ in London, a platform to critically speculate on the implications of selling the remains of Empire today. Their first book about the project was published by Columbia Books on architecture and the city.
We began collaborating with Cooking Sections in 2018 through a research residency that took place during the Ways of Learning (2018) exhibition. This informed a longer term collaborative practice and programme that looked to trace and uncover Birmingham’s past and present relationship to Empire. Through the then proposed redevelopment of the historic Canal Office, Located in the Warwick Bar Conservation Area of Birmingham, Junction Works is situated at the intersection of the Grand Union Canal and Digbeth Branch Canal. Once an important example of a purpose-built canal office, the building fell into disrepair and became derelict; however retaining its strong industrial character and heritage at the heart of post-post industrial Digbeth. Since 1790 it has served a variety of canal transportation and manufacturing purposes, such as confectionary and screw production, the evidence of which can still be identified within the Junction Works site and architecture. Through its wide range of contributors, The Empire Remains Shop—Birmingham became a platform to investigate and explore the electrification of cities, programmed obsolescence, ballast bricks, the origins of Made Nowhere, petrol foods, unsounded factories, hostile environments, and much, much more.
In Nov 2018 as part of The Ways of Learning public programme they presented a performative lecture “DEVALUING PROPERTY REAL ESTATE AGENCY” that looked at the example of the Native and Invasive species and how a plant was able to have power of real estate, see Japanese Knotweed accompanied by a delicious Japanese Knotweed Cocktail, alongside a question and answer session hosted by curator and researcher Nat Muller, who notably curated “Stirring the Pot of Story: Food, History, Memory” at Delfina Foundation, London, which explored the direct links between power and control over food.
In 2019 we began a more formal collaboration initially through the formation of the Birmingham franchise of ‘The Empire Remains Shop’, which ran until 2020 before becoming Field Commissions in 2021. This ‘franchise’ which took the form of a book launch and series of artwork commissions during 2019-2020 saw the reanimation of the old Canal Office into ‘Junction Works’ – a space that Grand Union would call its future home. The longer term collaboration between Grand Union and Cooking Sections was to develop a long term practice based conversation as we transition through Junction Works Capital Project and support our reimagination, and ask what is the role of an arts space in the post-industrial landscape, now and in the future.
