Artist/activist duo 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 (born in 1984) and Alon Schwabe (born in 1984), their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation.

Salmon: A Red Herring questions what colours we expect in our “natural” environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of colour is changing as much as we are changing the planet. The book launched an international campaign against salmon farming that also presented an exhibition at Tate Britain.
In 2018, Cooking Sections heard of a sparrow that had turned bright pink on the Isle of Skye. So began an odyssey-like investigation into where it went, who was responsible, and what it signalled about its surrounding ecology. The pair spoke to fishermen in Mexico, where shrimp are turning grey, interviewed beekeepers in Brooklyn, who reported red-coloured honey, and investigated the Nornickel factory in Norilsk, Russia, where blue fog and black snow are industrial byproducts. Their findings are presented as a detective story for the era of environmentalism: a wildly inventive book, which Cooking Sections use to launch a new global campaign against fish farming.

Softcover, published in 2020, 7 x 11 cm, 176 pages.

ISOLARII’s tiny books

Founded in 2020, ISOLARII revives an extinct literary genre—the Renaissance “island book,” or isolario—to map the world’s most defiant and unruly intellects. ISOLARII are tiny, the size of a pack of cigarettes, but potent, maintaining the ethos that the most expansive ideas can be held in the hand. Authored by figures who interrogate the shape of the avant-garde, what it is, and what it could become, these volumes offer readers fully formed, high voltage ideas that can be finished during a commute yet felt for weeks. Editor of this series is Sebastian Clark.