Cooking Sections: The Empire Remains Shop

“Empire shops” (“Shops with imperial goods”) first emerged in London in the 1920s with the aim of teaching Britons to eat foods imported from colonies and overseas territories. Although none of these shops were ever opened, their purpose was to make products that were previously unavailable in the British Isles accessible: Australian sultanas, Palestinian oranges, Zanzibar cloves, or Jamaican rum. The project “The Empire Remains Shop” contemplates the possibilities and consequences of selling products from the places that remain from the British Empire today.

The book The Empire Remains Shop summarizes and develops a critical program of public installation and subsequent discussions, performances, dinners, installations, and projections that took place in the fall of 2016 at 91-93 Baker Street in London. Each of the contributions focused on food as a means of revealing traces of new geographies across the presence and future of our post-colonial world. The Empire Remains Shop is structured as a franchise agreement and presents some of the landscapes, visions, economies, and aesthetics that future copies of the shop will need in order to conceptually navigate through political contrasting structures to a hyper-globalized world where resources are better distributed.

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a London-based duo engaged in spatial realizations. It was established to explore the systems that shape our world through food. They use installations, performances, mapping, and videos to investigate the overlaps between visual art, architecture, and geopolitics through their research-based practice. In 2014, Cooking Sections exhibited at the United States Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale. Their work has also been seen at Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, the 13th Biennale in Sharjah, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Their exhibition OFFSETTED is currently on display at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University in New York. They were recently shortlisted for the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and the Visible Award. They are currently leading a workshop at the Royal College of Art School of Architecture in London.

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