Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) investigates the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism. They observe and analyze our transforming landscapes, the metabolic networks of industrial food production, and the impact of climate change on food systems. Using installations, performances, and video, their practice confronts the overlapping boundaries of art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics. Based on several years of research conducted in collaboration with science historian Hannah Landecker, the exhibition at Trafó Gallery invites us to reconsider our relationship with industrial livestock farming and, more specifically, with pigs.
At Trafó Gallery, within a space that resembles a domestic environment, a cumulative tale unfolds through a variety of objects, giving voice to the invisible infrastructures that shape our everyday lives. A polyphonic chorus of furniture, household items, and architectural elements reveals how pigs’ bodies are transformed into the materials that shape and make our surroundings, and how this process, in turn, affects the bodies of pigs and the industries that “produce” them.
Industrial pig farming, which poses significant ecological risks, is generally considered important primarily from the perspective of food production. Yet these facilities do far more than produce meat products: their operations are deeply intertwined with the construction industry, chemical manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and biotechnology. During the processing of animal renderings, organs, tissues, and various hormones are extracted from pigs for uses such as insulin production and the manufacture of anticoagulants. What remains of the animals’ bodies is further utilized by the construction industry. From superhydrophobic coatings and seamless finishes to concrete additives that improve flowability, the by-products of pig farming surround us in countless ways.
These materials have played a significant role in shaping the aesthetics of our built environment; they help insulate buildings, soften our clothing, ensure the “frictionless” operation of transportation systems, provide viscosity to our toothpaste, moisturize and tighten our skin, and make pain-relief capsules easier to swallow. Over the past century, industrial animal farming and its processing industries have thus increasingly determined not only the materials around us, but also how we perceive the world and position ourselves within it.
Originally presented at MAPS – Museum of Art in Public Space in Køge, Denmark, the exhibition forms part of the long-term collaboration between Cooking Sections and Trafó titled Becoming CLIMAVORE. The climate crisis is transforming not only the four familiar seasons but also the seasons of production. This serves as the starting point for the collective’s ongoing CLIMAVORE project, launched in 2015, which advocates for a radical transformation of agricultural practices and food cultures. CLIMAVORE is a long-term, site-responsive project, exploring how to eat as humans, how it affects climate change and how to metabolise climate breakdown. CLIMAVORE uses cultural platforms to amplify civic resistance: to this end, they introduce new seasons that both draw attention to pressing local ecological issues and, through partnerships with various arts institutions, explore regenerative solutions and alternatives.