Cooking Sections

Waves Lost at Sea traces the evolving practice of Cooking Sections-founded in London by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe-whose work spans visual arts, architecture, and ecology. Since 2013, they have been investigating anthropogenic infrastructures, industrial food systems, and human-made climates: from artificially colored farmed salmon and drained buffalo wetlands to ocean-filtering oysters and Sicilian tomatoes outlawed under EU regulations. Their research-based practice exposes the legal, environmental, and metabolic struggles behind what ends up on our plates, while simultaneously working to create prospects for the future. This monograph brings together six newly commissioned essays alongside an extensive series of images with detailed captions and reflective annotations. The book traverses legal fictions, queer ecologies, disappearing landscapes, multispecies entanglements, and speculative tastes. Through these layered investigations, Waves Lost at Sea invites readers to rethink food cultures and agricultural imaginaries-decentering humans at both microscopic and planetary scales. Co-published with Fundación Botín, the book appears in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name-Cooking Sections' first show in Spain-which runs at Centro Botín, Santander, from October 2025 to February 2026. Cooking Sections was nominated for the 2021 Turner Prize, received the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, and was shortlisted that same year for the Visible Award for socially engaged artistic practices.