The Empire Remains Shop by Cooking Sections

Gaia Art Foundation is pleased to announce its support of The Empire Remains Shop, a publication from Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe), a London-based duo of spatial practitioners who explore the systems that organize the world through food.

The Empire Remains Shop initially took the form of a public installation at 91–93 Baker Street, London, in 2016: conceived as a storefront display with event spaces, the shop acted as a forum within which to discuss the global circulation of food and consumer choices. The concept originates from Empire Shops, which were first envisioned in the 1920s to promote food trade between Britain and its overseas territories but were never realized.

Taking the 2016 public installation as its starting point, the book catalogues and develops the project’s critical program of discussions, performances, dinners, installations and screenings, supplementing documentation with newly commissioned essays that 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 counter structures for a better distributed, hyper-globalized world.

Published by Columbia University Press, the book includes a foreword by Elizabeth A. Povinelli and contributions from Elisabetta Brighi, Filipa César, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Jesse Connuck, Daniel Conway, Annalee Davis, Forager Collective, FRAUD, Ros Gray, Raphaël Grisey, Nitasha Kaul, Harry Keene, Laleh Khalili, Richie Maitland, Asunción Molinos, Shela Sheikh, Shahmen Suku/Radha La Bia, Bouba Touré, and Nicole Wolf.  Click here to pre-order the book from Columbia University Press. Empire Remains