Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organise the world through food.
Cooking Sections publication, entitled ‘The Empire Remains Shop.’
Using installation, performance, mapping, and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics.
Since 2015, they have been working on multiple iterations of the long-term site-specific CLIMAVORE project exploring how to eat as the climate changes. In 2016, they opened The Empire Remains Shop, a platform to critically speculate on the implications of selling the remains of Empire today. Their first book about the project was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
Building on a previous attempt to open an Empire Shop in Birmingham in January 1931, the first franchise of The Empire Remains Shop opened in the heart of the post-post-industrial landscape of Digbeth. Conceived for the renovation period of Junction Works, the Empire Remains Shop took over the facade and windows to host a range of new commissions and existing works that employ food as a tool to assemble new sites and geographies, while exploring origins, destinations, and exchanges across the present and future of our postcolonial planet.
Visitors to The Empire Remains Shop—Birmingham took part in the rolling programme of visual and sound installations facing Fazeley Street, the railway, and the canal, activating the site during the construction process. The series of works aimed to uncover Birmingham’s past and present relationship to Empire through culinary, chemical, cultural, and agricultural extractions, inventions, and interventions, while exploring other possible futures.
This project marked the beginning of Grand Union’s reanimation of Junction Works, reinstating the public’s relationship with this historic site. This franchise of The Empire Remains Shop was framed by our vision and hopes of what this new home could be for the organisation, and Digbeth in the face of regeneration. The programme shifted and changed seasonally, but was intended to be flexible and responsive to the needs of our context and the development of the building. We conceived of this collectively and used Junction Works as a base to unpack other histories in the city.
Alberta Whittle, ‘No Mudder Country,’ as part of Cooking Sections ‘The Empire Remains Shop’, 2020.
Following the first Empire Remains Shop opened by Cooking Sections in London, 2016, the project invites institutions, collectives, or individuals to open their own franchise of the Shop and use the existing framework to unpack colonial legacies in further places.
Embedded in the original meaning of the etymological origins of franchise in French—to free oneself from servitude—the project challenges the franchise model that later in the 20th Century was used for opposite purposes, such as unowning manufacturing, distribution, sales, and workers through dispersed intricate legal and financial structures. The Empire Remains Shop re-envisions the franchise as a platform that puts to question networks and infrastructures between created centres and imposed margins. Unlike many contemporary franchises that enforce standardisation regardless of location, any franchise of The Empire Remains Shop is site-specific, differentiating itself through its response to local contexts and colonial histories.
Cooking Sections, ‘The Empire Remains Shop – London’, 2016