The Empire Remains is a long-term project by Cooking Sections that explores the imaginaries that were set up by the British Empire to promote food trade between home and overseas territories. The project attests how global desire, geopolitics, power and food networks have evolved from the beginning of the 20th century until today. In order to understand the making of natures and economic landscapes, such as the “tropical” or the “middle east”, it traces rum, sugar, tobacco, chocolate, “exotic” fruits, and spices throughout the world.

In 2016 Cooking Sections will open The Empire Remains Shop in London. Taking the original Empire Shops as a reference, the Empire Remains Shop will function as a research-store hosting a public programme of exhibitions, installations, performances, screenings, tastings and events. These new, specially conceived interventions will employ food as a tool to assemble new geographies, borders, sovereignty, global networks and economic alliances. At the same time, it will explore spatial approaches to origin, destination and environmental trade between the present and future of our postcolonial planet. The visitor will be invited to either taste edible maps, consume products, or participate of the ongoing conversations that will constantly change throughout the life of The Empire Remains Shop.

Following their 6 weeks residency in Artport Cooking Sections invites visitors to discuss together some of the work and projects they have worked on while tasting some of the process leading up to the Empire Remains Shop.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) are spatial practitioners based out of London. Their practice 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 selected for OFFICEUS, the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. Their work has also been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Festival of Future Nows, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; dOCUMENTA(13); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; CA2M, Madrid; Fiorucci Art, Trust London; The Politics and Pleasures of Food, ACC Weimar; SOS 4.8, Murcia; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York; 2014 Biennale INTERIEUR, Kortrijk; and have been 2014 residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They have recently been recipients of the 2015 Jumex Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo research grants. Their work has been published by Sternberg Press, Lars Müller, Punctum Books, and several international magazines and journals, like Volume, Domus, 2G, The State, Zawia and Utopia amongst others.