Waves Lost at Sea opens at Centro Botín, Santander

Dear friends, colleagues, and kin,

This autumn, the tide carries new openings, fading waves, legal fictions, and the next phase of a Ministry. We’ve been tracing disappearing surf ecologies in Cantabria, contesting coastal pollution in Folkestone, and continuing to amplify the metabolic, juridical, and political entanglements between seeds, wetlands, waste, and food. Below, a glimpse of the traces we’ve been reading…

Waves Lost at Sea

Exhibition at Centro Botín, Santander
18 October 2025 — 1 March 2026

When waves vanish, entire ecologies collapse. Waves Lost at Sea traces the disappearance of eleven iconic surf breaks—from Mundaka on the Basque coast to the phosphate ports of Western Sahara and the tourist resorts of Cape St Francis. Erased by sand mining, dredging, or port expansion, these lost waves are a material imprint of extraction, entwined with global commodity flows and the erasure of coastal commons. But even when thought to have disappeared, their energy persists. In collaboration with scientists from GeoOcean, University of Cantabria – experts at tracing storms – these waves are read like past and future ghosts, drawing from oceanic data and archival records to render their estimated path, speed, shape, height. Featuring a performance-based installation and a sound work by Duval Timothy, the show opens up new tools to read disturbance, contamination, and loss.

Waves Lost at Sea is a performative installation by Cooking Sections, commissioned by Centro Botín, 2025.
Curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz
Music: Duval Timothy
Performers: Maider G. Etxegibel, Rebeca García Celdrán, Lucía López Madrazo, Léa Misseri, Laura Ramirez Ashbaugh, Julia Zac, Zhenxiang Zhao
Cooking Sections studio team: Max Cooper-Clark, Sofía Yáñez Perteagudo, Rosa Whiteley
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
Fabrication: Acualé, Isocor, Muelles Zaldua
Photos: Lourdes Cabrera

Manda Festivali 2025

Akpınar, Istanbul

The annual celebration of water buffalo returned to the postindustrial pastoralist wetlands of northern Istanbul this late summer for the fourth edition of the Manda Festivali. Herder families, kaymak producers, chefs, musicians, schoolchildren, and neighbours gathered to celebrate and protect the wetlands outside the city. In a landscape increasingly swallowed by mega-infrastructure and real estate speculation, the festival continues to defend water buffalo cultures as a vital form of multispecies resistance. This year’s festivities introduced new educational materials and a city-wide visual campaign featuring portraits of buffalo-herder intimacies by Ci Demi, wallowing back into public space. Together with the team at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA, we begin now to prepare for the 5th festival next year in spring 2026, the UN Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists.

CLIMAVORE x Jameel at Royal College of Art, Istanbul, 2023-2026.
Cooking Sections (PIs), Dani Burrows (Director of Care), Merve Anil (Research Associate), Kubilay Ercelep (Coordinator)

Ministry of Sewers – closes its doors in Folkestone!

Old Customs House, Folkestone

After three months of civic listening and water-based inquiry, the UK’s first Ministry of Sewers begins its second life. Commissioned by Folkestone Triennial, the space opened to fight for swimmable seas and sewage justice, where Ministers collected testimonies from swimmers, farmers, ecologists, and schoolchildren across Folkestone, Hythe, and Romney Marsh documenting skin rashes, business losses, aquifer depletion, or property damage linked to water privatisation and systemic coastal pollution. In 2023, over 4,000 hours of raw sewage discharge turned bathing into a battleground. The Log of Grievances, compiled over the summer, remains open online—and nearly 7,000 signatures have already been collected to demand year-round water testing and an end to corporate impunity. Let’s push for 10,000.
If you’ve experienced polluted waters along the Kent coast → share your grievance here

Recent Publications

If you’d like to read more about Istanbul’s wallowing buffalos or the rights of peasant seeds in southern Italy, here are three recent articles:

“Advancing Legal Fictions: Rights of Seeds amid Drought Resistance in Puglia and Sicilia“
Daniel Fernández Pascual, Alon Schwabe, Enrico Milazzo & Gabriella Patera. In Poliarchie / Polyarchies (University of Trieste, 2025)
A critical reflection on participatory legal infrastructures developed with farmers and museums to protect unregistered seeds from extinction.

“Seed Margins“
Cooking Sections & Enrico Milazzo. In Common Sensing (Spector Books & CRA Press, 2025)
Investigating the regulatory asymmetries that trap seeds in certification regimes, and imagining models of seed redistribution and autonomous propagation.

“Wallowing in Istanbul’s Postmining Wetlands“
Cooking Sections & Merve Anil. In Swamplands Reader (Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2025)
A queer reading of buffalo mud ecologies, wetland disappearance, and the politics of wallowing on Istanbul’s urban periphery.