Cooking Sections
Researcher, Editor, Curatorial Assistant
Offsetted
Exhibition, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia GSAPP, NYC 2019
For more, see here
From colonial settlements to community protests against gentrification, to recent “green renewal” projects such as Million Trees NYC, the case studies in the exhibition together uncover the political and economic interests behind the planting of trees in the city. Offsetted reveals the ways that trees have been mobilized to negotiate the permanence and disappearance of the built environment and, as a result, how they have been used to both displace people and secure their rights to occupancy.
Offsetted seeks to launch a public debate on the financialization of the environment—from the scale of a city tree to an ecological reserve—and on current forms of environmental justice. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Cooking Sections will further develop the project by exploring procedures for the de-financialization of the environment and the stakes of such actions. Challenging the imposed obligation on trees to perform as speculative assets and environmental mitigators, they propose ways to acknowledge the right of trees not to serve as carbon offsets, allowing them to just be trees.
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Researcher, Editor, Curatorial Assistant
Offsetted
Exhibition, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia GSAPP, NYC 2019
For more, see here
From colonial settlements to community protests against gentrification, to recent “green renewal” projects such as Million Trees NYC, the case studies in the exhibition together uncover the political and economic interests behind the planting of trees in the city. Offsetted reveals the ways that trees have been mobilized to negotiate the permanence and disappearance of the built environment and, as a result, how they have been used to both displace people and secure their rights to occupancy.
Offsetted seeks to launch a public debate on the financialization of the environment—from the scale of a city tree to an ecological reserve—and on current forms of environmental justice. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Cooking Sections will further develop the project by exploring procedures for the de-financialization of the environment and the stakes of such actions. Challenging the imposed obligation on trees to perform as speculative assets and environmental mitigators, they propose ways to acknowledge the right of trees not to serve as carbon offsets, allowing them to just be trees.
Moveable Estates
Site-specific commission, Winterton-on-Sea, UK
New Geographies 2020
For more, see here
Site-specific commission, Winterton-on-Sea, UK
New Geographies 2020
For more, see here
What makes real estate ‘real’? Can houses move and retreat from the eroding shores? Moveable Estates explores coastal erosion and flexible forms of human inhabitation; where the sea ends and the land begins. The project takes as a point of departure references of buildings that have been uprooted and moved from their original location due to economic incentives, local tradition, cultural shift or unstable ground, in Norfolk, and elsewhere. Moveable Estates invites listeners to think about the future role of cities in envisioning fluctuating horizons.
The North Sea has deposited, transported and eroded the sand that defines the zone of the East Anglian coast for millennia. More recently, these movements have been magnified in a series of events from the 1953 North Sea Flood to the 2018 ‘Beast from the East’. Rising sea-levels, recurrence of severe storms, and the construction industry increasingly dredging the offshore seabed for sands, keep shifting tidal flows and increase the chance of cliff landslides due to the crashing of waves on weakened ground. City walls and military bunkers lie parallel to flood defences, ‘wars’ are fought against ‘eviction’ by the new coastal enemy. They sit between homes whose “priceless” coastal views have dissolved their monetary value and insurability. Moveable Estates invites listeners to think about the future role of cities in envisioning such fluctuating horizons.
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The North Sea has deposited, transported and eroded the sand that defines the zone of the East Anglian coast for millennia. More recently, these movements have been magnified in a series of events from the 1953 North Sea Flood to the 2018 ‘Beast from the East’. Rising sea-levels, recurrence of severe storms, and the construction industry increasingly dredging the offshore seabed for sands, keep shifting tidal flows and increase the chance of cliff landslides due to the crashing of waves on weakened ground. City walls and military bunkers lie parallel to flood defences, ‘wars’ are fought against ‘eviction’ by the new coastal enemy. They sit between homes whose “priceless” coastal views have dissolved their monetary value and insurability. Moveable Estates invites listeners to think about the future role of cities in envisioning such fluctuating horizons.
Empire Remains Shop
Research, Exhibition and Events Programme, Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham, 2021
For more, see here and here
"Empire shops" were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they were intended to make previously unfamiliar produce and products—sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica—available in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today, using food to trace new geographies across the present and future of our postcolonial planet. Structured as a franchise agreement. The Birmingham iteration discusses the origins of brown Sauce as a concotion of goods “thrown up by empire”, the relationship between gas lighting and worker exploitation, and the extraction of chocolate from West African colonies. The book which emerges from the Empire Remains Shop Project lays out some of the landscapes, imaginaries, economies, and aesthetics that future iterations of the Shop would need to address in order to think through political counterstructures for a better distributed, hyper-globalised world.
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Research, Exhibition and Events Programme, Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham, 2021
For more, see here and here
"Empire shops" were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they were intended to make previously unfamiliar produce and products—sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica—available in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today, using food to trace new geographies across the present and future of our postcolonial planet. Structured as a franchise agreement. The Birmingham iteration discusses the origins of brown Sauce as a concotion of goods “thrown up by empire”, the relationship between gas lighting and worker exploitation, and the extraction of chocolate from West African colonies. The book which emerges from the Empire Remains Shop Project lays out some of the landscapes, imaginaries, economies, and aesthetics that future iterations of the Shop would need to address in order to think through political counterstructures for a better distributed, hyper-globalised world.
CLIMAVORE
Research, design, curation, Worldwide 2019-2020
For more, see here
CLIMAVORE is a research platform and agency that questions how to eat as humans change climates. the project operates around three pillars: Relearning, Regrowing, Rebuilding, each rooted in the idea that research is design and design is research. CLIMAVORE co-designs community-led food systems that are ecologically restorative and socially reparative, aiming to empower coastal communities who are custodians of their land, culture and futures, and to drive a just transition in the wake of the climate and biodiversity crises.
During my time with Cooking Sections, I worked on a range of project iterations exploring salmon fishing in Skye (here), mussel growing and experimental terrazzo composiiton in LA (here), and mangrove restoration in Colombo (here).
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Mussel Beach
Los Angeles Public Art Triennale
Research, design, curation, Worldwide 2019-2020
For more, see here
CLIMAVORE is a research platform and agency that questions how to eat as humans change climates. the project operates around three pillars: Relearning, Regrowing, Rebuilding, each rooted in the idea that research is design and design is research. CLIMAVORE co-designs community-led food systems that are ecologically restorative and socially reparative, aiming to empower coastal communities who are custodians of their land, culture and futures, and to drive a just transition in the wake of the climate and biodiversity crises.
During my time with Cooking Sections, I worked on a range of project iterations exploring salmon fishing in Skye (here), mussel growing and experimental terrazzo composiiton in LA (here), and mangrove restoration in Colombo (here).
Mussel Beach Los Angeles Public Art Triennale
Sea Change
Colomboscope 2019