The Microscopic and the Planetary
Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe of Cooking Sections speak with Alexandra Pereira-Edwards and Anna Tonkin about agency, intimacy, and building connections
- APE
- Your practice seems anchored in an approach that operates between disciplines, and that is reliant on various forms of collaboration, with food at the centre. As a broad starting point, how does collaboration play into your practice and how is it a way of approaching various frictions in the contexts that you’re working in?
- DFP
- When we started working together in 2013, food became a tool to understand different landscapes in transformation, or power structures, or economic structures, or processes of financial speculation, or failures in the food system at large, and we began by focusing on some ingredients or crops as an entry point. From our own backgrounds, we approach our work through the lens of how space is built or destroyed, or how some of these forces actually shape the built environment. And to do that, many times we like to collaborate with different people that have specific knowledge. So if we are looking into oyster ecologies, we try to learn from a marine scientist, or if we’re talking about trees, we then partner with a botanist to understand certain metabolic cycles between fish and trees. The different collaborations that we’ve been shaping over time are not necessarily planned from the beginning—even if we purposely work by invitation—but it’s about following the process of inquiry to see what fields of knowledge are needed as we go along. And some of these collaborations continue across projects, which is quite interesting. Collaborations might start with something very specific, but suddenly a couple of years later, we pick up the conversation for a completely different context.
- AS
- The way we work necessitates collaboration. I don’t think it’s just a matter of believing in collaborative projects, but also about agency or how we think of projects as opportunities to intervene in food infrastructure, which requires a lot of collaboration with diverse actors on the ground. In many ways the projects would not exist without these kinds of collaborations that are at the heart of it and are in many ways driving the work.
Bivalve Murals, Cooking Sections with CLIMAVORE Station Skye & Raasay, 2024. Photo by Jordan Young
- AT
- Your projects unfold in very specific contexts, and yet as you mention, collaborations or ideas might move across them. How do you balance embedding yourself in a place and understanding the conditions of that place, but also accounting for how those ideas might transfer to another context?
- AS
- One of the things that has kept us focused on food for so many years now is the fact that, if we use Gabrielle Hecht’s framework, it’s an interscalar vehicle: it exists in multiple spaces and multiple realms simultaneously.1 When you look at food and how it transgresses different boundaries and bodies, it immediately becomes something that exists in the microscopic and in the planetary at the same time. So of course you have to be with it in the place. There is a lot of research and time that goes into understanding places and spending time in places and also building collaboration in places. So there will always be someone that is facilitating or making the introduction into a certain space and working together with us. But then again, because all of these things are multi-scalar, they also exist in multiple places. These questions also transpire on horizontal or diagonal planes.
Work we are doing in Skye to address the pollution from salmon aquaculture consists of looking instead at bivalves like oysters and clams. We’ve been working on intertidal zones for many, many years and trying to understand these liminal spaces between sea and land. But that brought us in contact with many different communities from South Korea to Chile to Taiwan that in a way share many things with Skye in terms of extractivism resulting from intensive salmon or shrimp farming despite being radically different contexts. It has always been a process of asking how you build these connections, relationships, and forms of solidarity between different spaces and how we can move between all of these places. How do you share these forms of knowledge between communities as well and find ways to create exchange or knowledge transfer towards shared access to land, ecological, and social struggles? - DFP
- And I think it also has to do with how we work together with our colleagues and collaborators. I mentioned that each project always starts by invitation from a cultural institution or a museum or a biennial. But then we put a lot of effort into how to try to continue these relationships over time beyond the limitations of the duration of, say, an exhibition, which is usually a few months. For instance, now we are doing work with water buffalo herders on the postindustrial wetlands of Istanbul, engaging with this fragile ecosystem, which started in a museum and then continued with the Istanbul Art Biennial. Now collaborators Merve Anil and Kubilay Ercelep continue the research, policy work, and actions on the ground, but more importantly, the regular exchange with the buffalo herders, meeting them on a mostly weekly basis and drinking tea together. That is crucial work, and they also become the face of the project. And that’s another aspect of the collaboration that almost makes the work take on its own life. Or, for a project in Italy about peasant seeds—unregistered seeds adapted to local conditions that have been cultivated and exchanged between farmers across generations—for instance, we are working through a lot of questions around drought and how to support different farms and food cooperatives to grow and propagate heritage, drought resistant varieties of vegetables. In this process, farmers make demands to a museum in the country to do something else and support them to access land and preserve agri/cultural heritage. And this involves a lot of changing roles, especially in this longer-term process.
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Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–141. ↩
Manda Festivali, 2024. Photograph by Deniz Sabuncu. Courtesy of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA
Manda Festivali, 2024. Photograph by Deniz Sabuncu. Courtesy of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA
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- AT
- I keep thinking of agency, whether it be the agency of oysters or buffalo or in this Italian case, seeds. There may be many people and many different experts involved, but there is also collaboration with the plants or the animals themselves. What role does agency play at different points, and does that shift how you think about a project?
- DFP
- We try to think from the perspective of the buffalo or the perspective of the seeds or the perspective of the oysters. What do they actually want? And we don’t have the answers. But it’s almost an effort to decentre the role of our human vision. It is not easy because we have a lot to unlearn, but we try to bring back those questions over and over again. That sometimes helps us to consider many other bodies or entities that are in direct relationship or physical or metabolic exchange with one another.
- AS
- Thinking of our project in Italy, I don’t know if we can ever really think like seeds. But we can acknowledge the fact that seeds and people co-evolved and that we’re codependent on each other. The communities and farmers that we work with are incredible stewards of these practices and of this heritage which is both agricultural and cultural in very deep ways. They understand that they are dependent on the seeds as much as the seeds are dependent on them, and they’re advocating for their existence because by that they’re also advocating for their own existence, in a sense. This mutualism is really interesting. And in the case of water buffalo, it is the same. There’s a very unique relationship there: the buffalo are dependent on the herders and the herders are dependent on the buffalo, and there’s a whole community of birds and worms and amphibians and little shrimp that are also dependent on this relationship between the two. So how do you bring that to the fore, and how do you also create space where you could involve them so that they can have a role in decision-making?
- DFP
- If I were a seed, would I need to be reproducing immediately? Or would I want to wait for a moment when it’s easier to grow? Or would I be sensing what my other neighbouring seeds are doing? What would you do if you were an oyster, or a buffalo? Do I like humidity? Do I follow what the industry is telling me to do, or do I have a choice to be a renegade and not follow what is expected? Even just putting yourself there helps to get you out of yourself.
- APE
- If I was a buffalo, I would probably try hard to make friends with the bird that lives on my head.
- AT
- And I feel like if I was a seed, I would probably not try and grow until it was easiest—maybe I’d be lazy.
Senza Passata Non C’è Futuro. Photograph by Eleonora Carrozza. Courtesy CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA
Senza Passata Non C’è Futuro. Photograph by Eleonora Carrozza. Courtesy of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA
Senza Passata Non C’è Futuro. Photograph by Eleonora Carrozza. Courtesy of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA
Senza Passata Non C’è Futuro. Photograph by Eleonora Carrozza. Courtesy of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA
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- APE
- In all of this, it’s never really possible to isolate one single thing as the subject. The seed is not just the seed, it’s also the whole network of everything else that contributes to its success. This leads to something else I was curious to ask you about: on paper, your work isn’t necessarily “erotic,” if I could use that word. But at the same time, there is something so intimate about the relationships that emerge in an ecosystem, and something very sensual about the way that you approach the contexts that you work within. I’m thinking about the water buffalo and their wallowing, which is an act that is so intimate with the wetland ecosystem. So I’m curious how the concept of the erotic, or maybe taken in a slightly different direction, the intimate, plays into things for you?
- DFP
- I think we are trying to bring that out more and more, because it is true that we deal with a lot of questions around reproduction, but also a lot of very queer questions around how all these different species interact (or not) with each other, often pushing for nonbinary non-normative engagements. And there’s a lot of physical contact, say with the skin of the buffalo and the mud. There are sensorial experiences there, and we’re learning.
- AS
- And I think there’s something there for me that has to do with how much learning is done through a type of knowledge production that is not based on language, necessarily; on agreed, shared, predetermined codes that one can learn or be trained into. If we think about how we learn in situations where there isn’t necessarily a predetermined language, intimacy plays a huge role in that process. And then if you start observing the relationship between buffalo and herders, or farmers and their seeds, so much of it is about intimacy. When you grow things in an agroecological system, you have to constantly observe what is happening in the soil, what is happening to the plant, what the leaves are telling you, what the flowers are telling you, or the bees. And that is intimacy, right? To reach each other’s bodies, desires, dreams. And when you start really considering it, it is very erotic and there’s a lot of relationship building through that, which definitely could be thought from a queer perspective, and from the perspective of a multiplicity of species and ways of love that are nonconformist, and that, again, don’t pertain to the language we have been taught to understanding love and intimacy.
Water buffalo wallowing in Istanbul’s postindustrial wetlands. Photograph by Cooking Sections. Courtesy of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA.
- DFP
- It is also about generosity to a certain degree, because when you see some of the collaborators and how they engage with species, plants, or animals that they really, really care for, there is that intimacy. So powerful. But a lot of it is also about desire and understanding the desire of the other. What does this plant want? What does this buffalo want? And people that are in constant exchange, they really understand almost how to give pleasure to one another. If this seed has to germinate here, what can I do to give the most ideal environment without using agrochemicals so that we don’t poison each other? So there are a lot of these very erotic exchanges on the conceptual level, but also at the physical level.
- AS
- And these exchanges ultimately open up people’s ability to observe in ways that allow them to co-develop with other beings. Now, let’s wallow.
