Afterlife of Renderings
Principal and Co-Founder, Cooking Sections: Alon Schwabe
Principal and Co-Founder, Cooking Sections: Daniel Fernández Pascual
Looking across three long-term projects, this lecture traces the conflicts and contradictions driving the destruction and conservation of distinct ecological habitats by observing the commodification of animal bodies and their entanglements with the built environment. Working with residents and scientists, these cases expose the possibilities and dilemmas that emerge from postindustrial landscapes. From Scotland’s coastal waters, where intensive salmon farming has scarred marine ecologies and discarded oyster shells have become an alternative building material; to the rendering of animal life and pig by-products into the skeletons, skins, and aesthetics of Western modern interiors; to wetlands outside Istanbul, where the hooves and wallowing bodies of water buffalo help preserve wetland ecologies threatened by drainage, shipping canals, and real-estate speculation. Through these projects, Cooking Sections considers materiality as a set of ecological relations operating across multiple scales, from the animal body to periurban wastelands and the planetary circulation of extractive commodities. The lecture reflects on the practice’s evolving methodologies challenging forms of ownership and extraction, while developing forms of critical spatial practice and civic empowerment that can prefigure ways of inhabiting the world otherwise.
Food in the Atrium: 5:00 PM
Lecture begins: 5:30 PM