Final Thought
THE FIRST IN A NEW PUBLISHING SERIES EXPLORES THE ARTIFICIAL NATURE OF SALMON — THE FISH AND THE COLOUR
Cooking Sections’ true colours
No man is an island, but perhaps a book can be. Or even, as the new series Isolarii suggests, part of an entire archipelago of publications. Popular during the Renaissance, isolarii were “island books,” portable travelogues of sorts replete with maps that provided a sense of orientation as well as perspective. It’s a genre that editors Sebastian Clark and India Ennenga are reviving and reinventing by commissioning work from leading thinkers who explore “radical acts of preservation,” with a new isle released every two months.
It’s fitting that, for their inaugural pocket-sized publication, Salmon — A Red Herring, they looked to another island, one where the population of salmon is almost 1,600 times that of its human residents: the Isle of Skye. The site and its increasingly detrimental fish-farming practices have long been of interest to Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe of London-based spatial practice Cooking Sections. Since 2015, they have used their project Climavore to reimagine how humans harvest and consume food off the west coast of Scotland. Here, it’s the animal’s distinct tone that preoccupies the duo.
“The force that is colour is not for domestication,” they write in “Oranges,” the first chapter. “It is fugitive.” Colour is not merely ornamental, in other words; it’s inscribed with cultural values and aesthetic expectations. “Green with envy” and “a case of the blues,” to name a few colloquial uses, transform such shades into codified, metaphoric language. “By giving colour meaning,” muses experimental chef David Zilber in his introduction, “we colour the world.”
These fugitive hues become more and more apparent as one proceeds through the 12 chapters, the pages slowly desaturating from deep red to pale hues of barely salmon, paralleling a narrative that dances over grey fish flesh and sea lice to chromatic transformations in the Arctic and red snow in the Russian city of Norilsk. A spectrum of uncanny tints coinciding with the increasingly constructed nature of nature is revealed in the process.
“Colour does not flow through bodies,” Cooking Sections reminds, “but rather bodies flow through colour.” Salmon are salmon because they once consumed shrimp and krill rich in the carotenoid astaxanthin. Now, they consume artificial supplements to dye their flesh rosy. Sparrows can be salmon, too, after ingesting these pellets. In the end, we are what we eat — colour and all. Like salmon, our interiors are their own kaleidoscopic landscapes. So, what colour are we? cooking-sections.com, isolarii.com
Part of the “Art Now” series, the corresponding exhibition “Cooking Sections: Salmon — A Red Herring” runs from November 27, 2020 to February 28, 2021 at the Tate Britain in London.