Who's in town?
Cooking Sections
Salt Beyoğlu
May 16, 2018 19.00
The Empire Remains Shop
91–93 Baker Street, London (August 4-November 6, 2016)
Photo by Tim Bowditch
91–93 Baker Street, London (August 4-November 6, 2016)
Photo by Tim Bowditch
Walk-in Cinema
The Empire Remains Shop
Empire Shops were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British how to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they intended to make foods such as sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica available and familiar in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop, a public installation that opened in 2016, speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today. It works as a platform to investigate and explore postcolonial spatial implications behind the “exotic” and the “tropical,” conflict geologies, the financialization of ecosystems, “unnatural” behaviors, the ecological perception of “invasive” and “native” species, the architecture of retiring to former colonies, or the construction of the offshore and Special Economic Zones. Published in April 2018 by Columbia University Press and structured as a franchise agreement the book with the same title lays out some of the landscapes, imaginaries, economies, and aesthetics that future iterations of the shop would need to address in order to think through political counter structures for a better distributed, hyper-globalized world.
Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a London-based duo of spatial practitioners. They explore the systems that organize the world through food. Using installation, performance, and mapping, their research-based practice operates within the overlap among visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics. They have been part of the US Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; residents of The Politics of Food program at Delfina Foundation; and have shown their work at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum, dOCUMENTA (13), the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Centre for Contemporary Architecture in Montreal. They were part of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and 2016 Brussels ParckDesign, and recently completed a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco. They lecture internationally and lead an architecture studio at the Royal College of Art in London that investigates the financialization of the environment.
The Empire Remains Shop
Empire Shops were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British how to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they intended to make foods such as sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica available and familiar in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop, a public installation that opened in 2016, speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today. It works as a platform to investigate and explore postcolonial spatial implications behind the “exotic” and the “tropical,” conflict geologies, the financialization of ecosystems, “unnatural” behaviors, the ecological perception of “invasive” and “native” species, the architecture of retiring to former colonies, or the construction of the offshore and Special Economic Zones. Published in April 2018 by Columbia University Press and structured as a franchise agreement the book with the same title lays out some of the landscapes, imaginaries, economies, and aesthetics that future iterations of the shop would need to address in order to think through political counter structures for a better distributed, hyper-globalized world.
Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a London-based duo of spatial practitioners. They explore the systems that organize the world through food. Using installation, performance, and mapping, their research-based practice operates within the overlap among visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics. They have been part of the US Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; residents of The Politics of Food program at Delfina Foundation; and have shown their work at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum, dOCUMENTA (13), the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, and the Centre for Contemporary Architecture in Montreal. They were part of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and 2016 Brussels ParckDesign, and recently completed a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco. They lecture internationally and lead an architecture studio at the Royal College of Art in London that investigates the financialization of the environment.
