The exhibition
COOKING SECTIONS: WAVES LOST AT SEA
18 October 2025 – 1 March 2026
Waves Lost at Sea is a performative installation by Cooking Sections – an artist practice formed by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe – that traces the disappearance of eleven memorable, significant waves.
For centuries, coastal communities have learned to read waves: for navigation, nourishment, or surfing. Dredging, port expansion and coastal construction have reshaped shorelines and altered seabeds, causing certain waves to vanish across the globe: from Mundaka’s sandbar in the Cantabrian Sea to El Marsa’s phosphate port in Western Sahara. These natural entities sustained important human and more-than-human ecologies and communities. Their loss is not just the loss of a break, it is the loss of an ecological landscape and cultural history.
For this installation, the stories, rhythms, and patterns of eleven lost waves have been translated into a musical composition and a choreography involving eleven suspended springs that are activated by performers in a continuous loop. The gallery space becomes an ephemeral monument to the lost waves, updating the traditional human-centric idea of a monument through their ghostly presence.
We invite you to walk around, sit, listen, and feel how the waves moved and how they vanished, what remains, and what can still be protected.
Curator: Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz
The exhibition is accompanied by a book co-published by Fundación Botín and Spector Books with newly commissioned essays by architect Nerea Calvillo, art historian and environmental humanities scholar Sria Chatterjee, art and ecology theorist and researcher Ros Gray, anthropologist and eco-activist Yayo Herrero, architect and curator Theodossis Issaias, and environmental lawyer Mari Margil.
Cooking Sections began their collaboration in 2013 in London. Since then, they have developed long-term, site-specific projects that question how to live and eat in the face of the climate crisis. Often working through sustained engagement with coastal ecologies, their practice traces the entanglements between humans, landscapes, and shifting environments. They have worked on the long-term CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates.
Their work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, SALT, Bonniers Konsthall, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh among others; the Taipei Biennial, 58th Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Shanghai Biennial, Los Angeles Public Art Triennial, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Performa17, and Manifesta12. They are Readers in Architecture and Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art; Principal Investigators at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA and Fellows at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Cooking Sections were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021.
The exhibition follows on from Reading Ocean Imprints, a workshop led by Cooking Sections in September 2024 that took place in Santander and the Nansa Valley in Cantabria. The programme explored the natural environment of Cantabria and analysed the traces that human activity leaves in the ecosystems through readings, improvisations and performative actions.
Credits
- MUSIC: Duval Timothy
- PERFORMERS: Maider G. Etxegibel, Rebeca García Celdrán, Lucía López Madrazo, Léa Misseri, Laura Ramirez Ashbaugh, Julia Zac, Zhenxiang Zhao
- WAVE RESEARCH: GeoOcean, Universidad de Cantabria (Fernando Javier Méndez Icera, Jared Ortiz-Angulo Cantos, Gabriel Bellido Prieto, Laura Cagigal Gil)
- STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING: Manja van de Worp
- COOKING SECTIONS STUDIO TEAM: Max Cooper-Clark, Sofía Yáñez Perteagudo, Rosa Whiteley
Where
Room 2
