Explore the 2025 Season

Fisher Center LAB Biennial

Cooking Sections: When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]]

A three-part performance installation

October 13, 2022

Add to Calendar2022-10-13 12:00 am2022-10-13 11:59 pmEDTCooking Sections: When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]]

Part 1 • Salmon: A Red Herring
Lecture performance
Location: Sosnoff Stage
Commissioned by Art Now, Tate Britain

Part 2 • Salmon: Traces Of Escapees
Immersive video installation
Location: Sosnoff Stage Right
Commissioned for the 2021 Turner Prize Exhibition

Part 3 • Salmon: Feed Chains
Performative installation
Location: Tower Storage
Co-commissioned by Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and Fisher Center at Bard

Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater,
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When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]] is a trilogy of performative installations tracing the effects of salmon farms on multiple ecologies. The three works focus on the impact of food production based on extractive systems that push the environment to the verge of collapse. Shown for the first time in North America, the trilogy portrays farmed salmon as a constructed animal, one of the most recently domesticated and industrialized species in history.

Part 1, Salmon: A Red Herring, questions what colors we expect in our ‘natural’ environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of color is changing as we change the planet.

Part 2, Salmon: Traces of Escapees, explores the environmental impact of salmon farms, which can be traced far beyond the circumference of open-net pens, and everything that escapes through them.

Part 3, Salmon: Feed Chains, subjects the audience to the automated feeding mechanism of the salmon farm. The piece revolves around the eco-systems that are transformed into feed, the landscapes that are fed to farmed fish and the pellets that are consumed by salmon in their feedlots. 

Schedule

Thursday, October 13

  • Parts 2 & 3 (Installation) • 6–9 pm

Friday, October 14

  • Parts 1, 2 & 3 (Performance) • 6–7 pm
  • Parts 2 & 3 (Installation) • 7–9 pm

Saturday, October 15

  • Parts 2 & 3 (Installation) • 12–1:30 pm
  • Parts 1, 2 & 3 (Performance) • 2:30–3:30 pm
  • Parts 1, 2 & 3 (Performance) • 6–7 pm
  • Parts 2 & 3 (Installation) • 7–9 pm

Sunday, October 16

  • Parts 1, 2 & 3 (Performance) • 2:30–3:30 pm
  • Parts 2 & 3 (Installation) • 3:30–5 pm

About the Artists • Cooking Sections

Cooking Sections 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. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop.

Their work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, SALT, Bonniers Konsthall, Lafayette Anticipations, Grand Union, Atlas Arts, Storefront for Art and Architecture; the Istanbul Biennial, Taipei Biennial, 58th Venice Biennale, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah Art Biennial, Performa17, Manifesta12, and New Orleans Triennial among others. They have been residents at Headlands Center for the Arts, California, and The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They are part of British Art Show 9. They lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London. 

Cooking Sections were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. They were awarded the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and were nominated for the Visible Award for socially-engaged practices. Daniel is the recipient of the 2020 Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for Being Shellfish.

Digital Program

Becoming Climavore

BARD TO BECOME THE FIRST COLLEGE IN THE WORLD TO INTRODUCE A CLIMAVORE MENU

New ‘seasons’ are gradually emerging on our planet. The lines between spring, summer, autumn and winter are increasingly blurred, while periods of drought, oceanic pollution, soil depletion, subsidence and pandemics are becoming more prevalent.

As part of COMMON GROUND: an international festival on the politics of land and food, Bard College, in collaboration with Parkhurst Dining, has joined Cooking Sections’ extensive project Becoming CLIMAVORE to find new ways of eating in response to the new seasons of the climate emergency. Launched in 2017, this long-term initiative encourages institutions to remove farmed salmon from their menus and replace it with ingredients that improve biodiversity, soil and water quality. More than twenty art institutions are already involved in the project, including Tate and Serpentine in London. In collaboration with BardEATS, the Bard Office of Sustainability, and Parkhurst Dining, Bard has removed farmed salmon from its menu and introduced new dishes made with ingredients that help environmental regeneration.

Common Ground: An international festival on the politics of land and food

Curated by Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester
In association with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA)

The Fisher Center LAB Biennial is a thematic festival that invites and commissions artists to create new works that grapple with some of the most pressing questions of our time. The 2022-23 edition, Common Ground, is a year-long international program focusing on the politics of land and food and taking place on four continents. We have commissioned new works from artists whose practices engage with food sovereignty, climate change, and land rights. Together invite you to join them in imagining a more equitable, sustainable, healthful, and delicious future.

Common Ground includes two four-day festivals at and around the Fisher Center—one at harvest time (October 13–16, 2022) and one in the growing season (May 4–7, 2023).