Common Mud & Flooded Pits looks at Istanbul’s post-industrial wetlands, water buffalo herding, and the pressures of mega-infrastructure expansion. As shipping canals, runways, bridges and highways encroach on grazing lands, different spatial tactics emerge to sustain the permanence of buffalo, herders and their companions. Their struggle revolves around resisting displacement to restore the muddy commons. 

This lecture-performance examines wallowing as an ecological and political act, questioning the extractive logics of land grabs. Amid shrinking wetlands and flooded mine pits, food, music and grazing corridors on grey zones offer new ways to wallow—reorganising territories, reclaiming space, and dancing, while fostering multispecies engagements.

Cooking Sections examines the systems that organise 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 trace landscapes in transformation, the spatial and metabolic legacies of extractivism. They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolise climate breakdown. 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, Carnegie Museum of Art, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Atlas Arts, HKW, SPACES, Storefront for Art and Architecture; the Taipei Biennial, 58th Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Cleveland Triennial, BAS9, Shanghai Biennial, Los Angeles Public Art Triennial, 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; Fogo Island Arts; and The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They were guest professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich in 2020-21. They are Readers in Architecture and Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art, London; Principal Investigators at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA and Fellows at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

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.

Image credit: Water Buffalo Commons, 2024. Photo Deniz Sabuncu. Courtesy CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA.