Book launch: Cooking Sections, The Empire Remains Shop
With Cooking Sections, Coco Fusco, and Natasha Ginwala

Join us for the launch of The Empire Remains Shop (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018), Cooking Sections’ first book following the eponymous ongoing research and installation. The evening will feature an introduction by Natasha Ginwala, the lecture-performance “The Next ‘Invasive’ Is ‘Native’” by Cooking Sections, and a discussion between Ginwala, Cooking Sections’ Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, and Coco Fusco about the remains of Empire; followed by The Plant That Could Sink Your Mortgage: Cocktails and Drinks. 

“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 the remains of the British Empire in London today. 

Based on a public installation that took place in London in the fall of 2016, The Empire Remains Shop book catalogues and develops the installation’s critical program of discussions, performances, dinners, installations, and screenings hosted at 91–93 Baker Street. The contributions each use food to trace new geographies across the present and future of our postcolonial planet. Structured as a franchise agreement, The Empire Remains Shop 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-globalized world.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organize the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping, and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture, and geopolitics. Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at Performa17; 13th Sharjah Biennial; Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York; dOCUMENTA(13); CA2M, Madrid; The New Institute, Rotterdam; UTS, Sydney; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; among others, and have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London, and Headlands Center for the Arts. The duo were part of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale and 2016 Brussels ParckDesign. Their work has been featured in a number of international publications (Lars Müller, Sternberg Press, Volume, and Frieze Magazine). The Empire Remains Shop is published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City–Columbia University Press. They currently lead a studio unit at the RCA, London.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and the Andrew Banks Endowed Professor of Art at the University of Florida. She is a recipient of a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), BAM’s Next Wave Festival, the Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, InSite O5, Mercosul, Transmediale, The London International Theatre Festival, VideoBrasil and Performa05. Her works have also been shown at the Tate Liverpool, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York.

Natasha Ginwala is a curator and writer. She curated Contour Biennale 8, Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and was curatorial advisor for documenta 14, 2017. Her other recent projects include Arrival, Incision. Indian Modernism as Peripatetic Itinerary in the framework of “Hello World. Revising a Collection” at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2018; Riots: Slow Cancellation of the Future at ifa Gallery Berlin and Stuttgart, 2018; My East is Your West at the 56th Venice Biennale, 2015; and Corruption: Everybody Knows… with e-flux, New York, 2015. Ginwala was a member of the artistic team for the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, 2014, and has co-curated The Museum of Rhythm, at Taipei Biennial 2012 and at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2016–17. From 2013–15, in collaboration with Vivian Ziherl, she led the multi-part curatorial project Landings presented at various partner organizations. Ginwala writes on contemporary art and visual culture in various periodicals and has contributed to numerous publications. This spring she joins as curator at Gropius Bau, Berlin.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.