Cooking Sections
Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernàndez Pascual
Established in London, 2013
Live in London
venue
Seaworthy
630 Carondelet Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Performances
Friday–Saturday, 4 PM–6 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
about the project
Oyster Readings
Performance; concrete, steel, and tabby dining table and stools
Oyster Readings is a performance and installation that uses oysters to better understand the environment, ecology, history, and future of the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. During the exhibition, visitors are invited for a reading of an oyster, tracing the lines of coastal inhabitation, subsidence, sedimentation, and life in this time of climate emergency.
Oysters have populated the waters of Louisiana for millennia, nourishing people living on its coasts. The presence of Native American oyster middens, or mounds of discarded shells, are a testament to the ancestral inhabitation of these lands and waters. Similar to tree rings, oyster shells record time and events. Every season an oyster grows a shell around its lip. As the shell grows, it encases the environmental conditions in which it lives. Oysters tell stories about hurricanes and droughts, the invention of dredgers, the expansion of Bulbancha/New Orleans, and the proliferation of its oyster bars. They also remember oil spills and gas leaks, sinking land, the shifting of the coastline, and, more recently, the effects of a global pandemic.
The artist duo created a dining table and stools following the local tradition of using discarded oyster shells as a construction material, gathering food waste from the city and replacing cement with shell lime. Visitors are welcome to stay and enjoy the special dish developed in collaboration with Seaworthy after their oyster readings to keep thinking about our common oyster futures.
This project takes place in Bulbancha, on the unceded territories of the Ishak, Biloxi, Caddo, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Houma, Natchez, Tunica, and others whose memories and ancestral rights may have been erased by the violence of settler colonialism.
To perform the Oyster Readings, Cooking Sections partnered with body poet, interdisciplinary artist, paris cyan cian, and artist, activist, and medicine woman, Isabelle Guzman.
oyster reading videos
P.5-Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings-Uptown T
Special thanks to Pascal's Manale Restaurant, pascalsmanale.com
P.5—Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings—Jeffery Darensbourg
P.5-Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings-Lindsay Allday Special thanks to Sidecar Patio & Oyster Bar, sidecarnola.com
P.5–Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings–Tasia Denapolis
To learn more about Pontchartrain Conservancy’s work, visit scienceforourcoast.org
P.5-Cooking Sections: Oyster Readings-Alex Kolker.
To learn more about LUMCON’s work, visit lumcon.edu
about the artists
The London-based duo Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, known as Cooking Sections, seamlessly blends installation, performance art, and food in their provocative works that address the topics of land use, consumption, climate, the environment, and labor. They look at how and what we will eat as our planet inevitably changes. Their seminal piece CLIMAVORE, an ongoing large-scale installation begun in 2015, explores the political and climatological implications of increasingly obsolete food production practices while challenging the viewer to consider future alternatives. Their work was featured in the Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018), the United States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2014), and has been exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, among others.
about the OYSTER READERS
paris cyan cian is a movement architect working with and through various interdisciplinary forms of dance, drawing, film, photography, and sound. Rooted in New Orleans, cyan’s creative work crosses at the intersections of Black girlhood futurity, ecology, and ritual, centering re-memory and durational play through Black (queer) feminist methodologies. cyan is committed to embodied practices of cosmic love and worldmaking. paris cyan cian received her BFA/BA in Dance with a concentration in social justice, gender women’s studies from Hollins University (2018) and Masters of Fine Arts in Choreography at Roehampton University, London, U.K (2021).
Isabelle Guzman received her BFA in Theater with a concentration in women’s studies from the College of Charleston (1994). In 2006 she lived and apprenticed in the rainforest region of San Ignacio, Belize where she became initiated into a lineage of traditional Maya spiritual healing. Not long after, she entered The New Seminary in New York City and began her thesis on Santeria & Vodou, but after a personal interview with Priestess Miriam Chamani of the Voodoo Spiritual Temple on Rampart, moved to New Orleans permanently where she now resides. Her personal practice, Temple Blacksnake, is named in honor of the sacred medicine passed down from Don Elijio Panti, a Mayan healer and H’men and Dr Rosita Arvigo, his long time mentee.
Guzman became involved with Cooking Sections after hurricane Ida devastated the coastal fishing villages of Louisiana. She works closely with Indigenous families of the Pointe Aux Chenes Indian tribe and mutual aid groups such as Imagine Waterworks and Bvlbancha Collective. It is her aim to inspire awareness and dialogue around climate crisis, disaster capitalism, and the ongoing colonization of Native land.
Cooking Sections, CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones, 2016–present. Site specific installation, Isle of Skye, Scotland. Commissioned by ATLAS Arts, Isle of Skye, Scotland. Courtesy of the artists. Photo by Ruth Clark