Cooking Sections: Waves Lost at Sea

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.