 So I'm just so happy today to be introducing Daniel Hernandez-Pascual and Shwabee, otherwise known as Crookman Sections. As I think many of you know, Daniel and I are a pair of spatial practitioners, to borrow their term. They move freely between design, writing, research, and yes, cooking. Their methods are curatorial, historical, ecological, culinary, but also I think fundamental to the work of architecture insults. We're super happy to have them here. They're based in London and they've been teaching with the RCA, where they've been meeting a studio recently on the question of natural capital. And they've been exhibited and published incredibly widely, including in our community a review. And I'm especially excited to say, in public, that they'll be publishing their next book with us, when we focus on the art section of the city, on the Empire for Banshock project, which they'll be sharing today. And they will also be sharing some of their cooking talents with you later. So you have that to look forward to. So I've had the privilege of attending one of their comic book dinners, which took me an incredible job of bringing together environmental and political thought into what feels like a dinner party with a few of your new best friends. And I hope we can sort of cultivate a bit of that vibe today. And to me, the privilege of the comic book project is that it seems to me that they don't all recognize the way that food brings people together in each sense of a sort of provisional social encounter, but also that links us into these sort of globalized networks of reproduction that remain based in colonial history, as well as linking us to sort of ongoing ecological crises like desertification, desolation, rising sea levels, and so on. Climate, of course, has cultural effects. And indeed, climate is culturally reduced. And so with that, I mean, for the format for today, we have a short lecture from Daniel Amal, maybe 30, 40 minutes, I think. My colleague Jesse Connick and I will join him for a bit of a conversation. And then we hope there will be time for this, especially sort of a robust exchange with the audience. So please join me in welcoming Perkin Satchin. Timber from Bermuda. Lamb from New Zealand. Fruits from Cyprus. Sausage from Nigeria. Sugar from Mauritius. Cotton from Uganda. Juggles today are the gold man's of tomorrow. These series of images of global cattle and food trade were produced by the Empire Marketing Board in the 1920s to encourage British citizens to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. The Empire Marketing Board constructed a highly sophisticated imaginary using landscapes and architectures to promote protectionist forms of shopping. For today's lecture, we will be discussing one of our latest projects, the Empire Remain Shop, through a different series of images. Under intensive visual propaganda, reminding us how empire buyers are empire vendors. The British government tried to boost trade through marketing foodstuffs that were cultivated all across the empire. The colonial planet became the supermarket for consumers all across the planet and the world, making availability of produce as a given. At the same time, the circulation of exotic tropical items also introduced a new series of stimulating substances for the bourgeoisie and industrial workers alike. Whereby vitamins, caffeine, nicotine, chocolate and sugar not only enhanced pleasure but boosted productivity in factories by making the human body dependent on energetic and relaxing substances. The fact that citizens could not experience in the flesh the production size of those foodstuffs made them believe in the construction of a new world imaginary. Propaganda in the forms of posters, films, recipes all to depict the geographical gap that was constructed between two realities. A relative proximity to a site of tropical foodstuffs and a relative distance to the abusive and violent labour conditions to produce those same products. So the planet to a certain extent was transformed into a highway connected and disjointing sites of production from sites of consumption. At the same time, colonies were depicted also as sites where inhabitants and wilderness had to be tamed. While more civilized dominions were organized by strict genetic order. And here this is just one example where on the right you see a sugar cane grown in Barbados and how both kind of the landscape and the subject have to be put under order where in South Africa and the orange growth are all fashionly ordered, very technological where the human body doesn't exist and kind of everything happens on its own. So BioPire every day reminds us the Empire Marketing Board posters to pedestrians in London in the 1920s. The responsibility of the economy of the nation was no longer a matter of the government but it was to transfer it onto people's consumption habits so if you don't buy and the national project collapses it will be your responsibility. Empire shops were planned to be open in London in the 1930s. They intended to make sotales from Australia, oranges from Palestine, clothes from Zanzibar and round from Chauvetka available and familiar in the British Isles. Through a series of empire recipes and empire products, the shop aimed to push people to buy cinnamon or not make but at the same time being indoctrinated on how to use them. None of the shops ever managed to open as the economic system of tariffs was introduced and the idea of an empire shop became redundant. So after a series of research streams to the Caribbean and the Antiquots and many other places tried to track the contemporary legacy of the food infrastructures that were put in place by the British Empire, we decided to open the first empire shop last year. Yet instead of selling products from the empire the Empire Remains Shop was launched as a platform to speculate on the possibility and implication of sending back the remains of the British Empire in London today. Over three months of duration between the Brexit vote and the Trump election, it employed food as a tool to question current forms of power when any new to the salmon dismantled geographies, origins and exchanges across the present and future of our post-colonial planet. This is one of our lovely friends. For the Empire Remains Shop, the original vision of the never-opened empire shops and their five part poster display was reinterpreted into this digital platform. So we invited over 14 contributors to respond to the still pressing remains of the empire power structures by drawing together performers performing as epitome papers, dinners, trips, sonic nights or a culinary provocations. Each contribution responding to the implications of selling the remains of the empire today. To overcome limitations of curation and disciplines contributions and contributors operated through a different set of agendas. After centuries of violent colonization, land dispossession and appropriation of natural and cultural resources the world still favours political structures that promote neoliberal nationalism. The Empire Remains Shop traced the construction of landscapes, imaginaries, economies and statistics that derived from trading imperial foodstuffs in order to critically think of political counter structures for a more evenly distributed hyper-globalized world. So in that regard, the Empire Remains Shop was used as a method to understand the space in which power structures operate and explore how to use that in the number of opportunity to simultaneously challenge them. This is a recipe of the Empire Christmas pudding from 1928. It links a series of 17 ingredients with 17 different geographic locations all across the globe. Currents from Australia, cinnamon from India, globes from Sansebar and apples from Canada. But more than recipe, this list of ingredients The Empire Remains Christmas pudding tracked the changes that have occurred in the post-colonial food market by exploring the economic strategies and forces that are in play. In the process that lasted a few weeks, the same list of ingredients from supermarket to all across London were sourced. The Empire Remains Christmas pudding made evident that once foodstuffs promoted a specific origin. Today, majority of food products are rendered packed in the UK milled in the UK, produced in the EU or using sugar from a range of countries or even being the Marara expired rather produced in the Marara. The new economies of origin are not about promotion of place but the erasure of it. It is more phenomenically viable to change the origin of the product every month according to prices predicted by national conflicts or weather disasters without having the obligation to tell the customer about the changes that are made to the products he purchases and consumes. In that regard, the certain dissolution of origin has shifted the logic from made in to made nowhere. A series of spaces in former colonies have emerged of the financial extraction of value, no longer agricultural but economies based on a place that does not need so infertility to cultivate that produce. Instead, there are places whose value depends on a disconnected economy. These offshore economies are epitomized by buildings like the Adler House here in the German islands where almost 20,000 global firms are registered in the same address, all housed in this forestry building. Following these new spatial and economic structures that emerged from this imperial legacy, this presentation is structured around five notions to explore possible future scenarios that could disrupt the violent logic of perpetual circulation and accumulation of capital and other ways of thinking about the built environment. In July 2013, lab technician Kenneth McCrae murdered his wife Jane before killing himself in the west midlands. He went mad after finding out that Japanese nutweed was growing under his house, spraying from the nearby golf course into his property. But no nutweed was found in the property after the fatal murder. Last year, William Jones hanged himself after being notified by the local council that the land he owned had Japanese nutweed growing on sites. Japanese nutweed, another non-native, invasive species having put the forefront of the war against non-humans in Northern Europe, but especially against invaders in the UK. They have been accused of taking over lands, private property and public grounds, gardens and forests, houses and old factories, highways and waterways, any ways in which a plant appears everywhere. Much before people started to panic about the presence of Japanese nutweed and take their life in their hands, the government allocated enormous funds to try and deal with the problem. The problem plants from elsewhere in Vedas here. The total cost of handling Japanese nutweed and other invaders for the taxpayer in the United Kingdom is about £200 million annually. It is estimated that the global expenditure on mitigation and eradication programs actually exceeds £1.8 million. In the 2000s, Japanese nutweed turned from a horticultural problem into a midiatic event. Journals, newspapers, tabloids all reported the great invasion. The garden invaded that could sink your mortgage. The plant is in Britain. Not in my backyard. At war with aliens. Panic was not caused by the presence of Japanese nutweed. It was banks and credit institutions who made people panic. Any trace of Japanese nutweed in most private property would likely result in the refusal to grant a mortgage. Real estate market and property value were victimized through the threat of the plant. And then a new industry of fear was born. For the construction of the subjective taxonomies of native and non-native, pseudo-objective thresholds are to be demarcated. So science and politicians need to determine the precise time an alien plant arrived or also when it became naturalized. The amount of years that a species has inhabited certain places should be, in theory, enough to determine its degree of belonging. Yet, what is the threshold? Is it 3 years, 30 years, 300 years, 3,000 years? Over the past two centuries, the plant has experienced, the planet has experienced a comparable movement of species across the globe. If we were to consider a longer time perspective, most native flora could be actually referred as to an alien invader. Not only the definition of native or non-native is challenging, but the association of the alien as a negative agent plays a crucial role in this distinction. Japanese nutweed fallopian Japonica has been stigmatized as a non-native invasive or the plant that can sink your mortgage. There are two main reasons why it has created such an uproar in British media. First being declared a non-native invasive plant, but also the fact that it can allegedly penetrate through the foundations of any house. However, both statements can be contested. Far from scientifically objective classifications, determining when a subject becomes invasive or naturalized depends on the artificial definition of spatial and time boundaries that confine her. On the other hand, there is no reverse evidence of Japanese nutweed being more damaging than other plants when it comes to growing through a crack on a concrete surface. Scared mongering, deflation of property value and the refusal to grant mortgages to homeowners that have found Japanese nutweed on their premises are processes that have created the market of expensive eradication programs. Here we can see one of these forms where banks deny mortgage based on the presence of the plants. So the next invasive is native, rethinks the alien as an entity that actually constructs a new reality and brings a valuable hybridization. As part of it, we started an archive of properties in the UK that have been evaluated by the Japanese nutweed and houses that have witnessed a homicide or suicide because of the panic and the presence of the plant and the loss of the family. At the Empire Remain Shop, we decided to open the Devaluing Property Real Estate Agency to think what is the agency of a plant in challenging the real estate market lobbying in a city like London. It was installed in our shop window and the Devaluing Property Real Estate Agency replicated the old familiar aesthetics of real estate window displays in central London. Hundreds of people stopped by the window to look at our assets on Baker Street. Some engaged with the topic, others ridiculed it, and others became infuriated for playing with such a serious business and a stable pillar of society. After a half hour of consultation on how to devalue your own or someone's estate property through the presence of the Japanese nutweed, customers were served the plant that can sink your mortgage ice cream. And recently, that incorporates and embraces Japanese nutweed as part of a post-industrial city ecosystem, showing one of the many ways the prolific growth of the plant can be put into use, rather than fighting it through million-dollar pesticide programs. Different from plantation houses being surrounded by the fields where value used to be hard to see, the Bangalow emerged as a building technology for capital flows, not from the immediate vicinity, but from afar. The gardens surrounding the Bangalow had in time a hedge to demarcate the property of the landlord and remind local inhabitants that the space of the Bangalow was also decided to manage exploitation. One of the plans that the British first introduced were the mental hedges around Bangalow properties and displayed the power relations that separated the garden from the outside was Lantana Camera. In less than a century, Lantana Camera has become one of the great tricks to wildlife and farming all across India. Brought from America to Europe by the Dutch, and then transferred to India by the East India Company, the plant serves as a mental hedge However, Lantana has taken over 30 million hectares across India and the rest of the planet and has prevented thousands of people from foraging other materials from the forest. On top of that, abusive environmental laws that aim to protect the forest from this invasion have not yet displaced them even further out for the sake of keeping forests pristine. In collaboration with Bangalow-based Forager Collective, we met with some members of the group of indigenous tribes living in the MMP's Karnataka. To learn about the ways they have started using Lantana to produce furniture as one possibility of economic resistance. The Solinga had lost access to bamboo, their traditional building material due to a series of laws that did not allow the use of it as a free resource. Lantana became the only raw material available they can legally have access to. So contrary to the sturdiness of bamboo as the material Lantana is much more pliable and allows for a flexible use. Although the craftsmen were producing furniture with Lantana, they were actually copying the shapes of bamboo items that were used. As part of the project we developed together a prototype of furniture made out of Lantana that explored a new geometry and aesthetics derived from the land. The forest does not employ me anymore. Looked at another form of economic success. Against the conventional logic of growth the author's aim of the business was to round out the raw material and go bust. How would the business set enough stools to get rid of 13 million hectares of Lantana camera enforcing bankruptcy upon our own business? Brown strips used to be one of the most important source of protein in the habitants along the river banks of the plains in Lantana all the way to its estuary. In order to keep up with the tremendous demand for shrimp sandwiches the very laborious peeling of the shrimp and not its abundance is what has been dictating its prices. The cheapest way to have affordable shrimp sandwiches in Lantana was to send the shrimp to the will be hand-pipped in designated special economic zones in Tantir and Tantuan in Morocco. Only to be sent back to Europe afterwards for consumption. As peeling workers are paid by the amount of the shrimp they manage to peel in an hour we could say that shrimp peeling factories are effectively improved by the freedom of the seas. Freedom from labor regulation freedom from environmental regulations freedom from duty positions and freedom from international property rights. Shrimping after working conditions was a new project for the empire made shop by the London Bay's duo Fraud, Audrey Sanson and Fran Gallardo. Their practice investigates forms of death making in the way space is managed. In the case of the brown shrimp the fact that its peeling has become more and more expensive with the years has ended the fishing of the shrimp. Rather than being extinct brown shrimp have gone commercially extinct and paradoxically that commercial extinction is what enabled their survival as species. As part of Fraud's investigation on how to die in a neoliberal age the project consisted of a series of shrimp in acts on the stirring and the performative peeling dinner. The tiny brown shrimp was struck from its water to its peeling facilities while guests were kindly invited to participate in the laborious and tenuous act of peeling and weighing the dinner. At the empire made shop a rum and bio ethanol fountain alternatively gives away one or the other according to the daily price of oil on Nasdaq. The macro scale logic of cycles of offer and demand is what eventually constructs and destructs spaces of production and sugar derivatives. From what once used to be the jewel of the British crown and island with 97% of its land used for sugarcane plantations Marbella has almost entirely lost its major economy to them. The complex technological invention that allowed to extract brown crystals out of sucrose from the juicy sugarcane grass not only established one of the most violent forms of torture and enslavement in the history of humanity but also was perpetuated as a way to supply sugar to the voracious European and North American markets. So the sugar mill ran on free labor first and later on almost free labor It made the world dependent on sweets as it made the working classes in industrial European cities be able to work through exhaustion and the defects of the calories supplied by Caribbean sugar. An industrial factory in London and its studios became tightly connected Both oppressed oppressor workers and both were part of a capital flow that delayed processes of urban transformation. Indeed, as it has been suggested it was the barbarian sugarcane fields that eventually modernized European cities In sugar trade days many of which are still in elite power positions in dimensions in the world owe their fortunes to those landscapes ranging from world renowned art museums to libraries, monuments and universities Furthermore the sugar conflict between the UK and the EU around the privileges of to common wealth sugar producing countries have pushed most of these post-imperial spaces to stop harvesting sugar The EU prioritizes internally produced beet sugar from France or Poland coming from overseas tropical sites hence Barbados is arriving soon to its last harvest sugar refineries on the island are at the verge of an economic collapse trying to think how to adapt to a global market that defends that they are an independent nation and yet does not buy their bulk sugar as it used to do The future of sugarcane is uncertain especially as Caribbean can not be by law can not be produced by law with sugar molasses from outside Caribbean islands One of the possible alternatives has proposed to redirect sugar molasses onto the production of bioethanol to keep the sugar landscapes existing but the demand for it relies on the prices of oil Whenever oil prices are low international demand for bioethanol drops and sugar molasses is used from production but whenever oil prices go up the world suddenly needs sustainable alternatives to cosine fuels and accordingly today we are agreeing is a fountain that does not let you choose if either steps run for bioethanol according to the price of oil that day In 1916 the Middle East was divided in two between the British and French counterparts The Saxe-Pico agreement drew a line to decades of international conflicts and wars amongst main military powers of the world for the appropriation of other national resources Since the opening of the Palestinian Potash mine in British Palestine the extraction of fertilizers in the Dead Sea has made the landscape one of the top seven Potash extraction sites in the world Aiming to solve the global shortage of food the hyper fertilization of soil worldwide has created spaces where utter destruction is legitimized in order to solve the world's famine but also to allow us to consume strawberries any time of year The mineral factory in the Dead Sea constitutes one of the global sites that has created the need for hyperfertility while it also materializes the way it is contributing to a certain end of seasons The entanglement between alterations in the climate and the constant supply of fertilizers, reaching Potash and nitrates can help us take about other practices beyond the abusing of the soil Since the early 2000s the Dead Sea level has been dropping a meter a year With it, the surface of the earth has not only entered a state of permanent risk of subsidence but also literally created over 5,000 sinkholes along its depleting shores These sinkholes have taken over the unique desert landscape some as large as 2 km long and 25 m deep Water running from the desertified mountains sinks into the ground where the sea once lay dissolving underground deposits of rock salt and creating huge cavities that eventually surrender to the weight of the earth on top Driving along the banks of the Dead Sea the site of abandon which resorts empty buildings and diverted roads amidst the arid landscape feels like an apocalypse in the lowest place on Earth Three main forces are accountable for this radical transformation A series of dams built along the Jordan River Basin in Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon The exhaustion of underground water resources for Israeli date palm plantations in Palestine and above all the extraction of fertilizers from the evaporation ponds run by the Dead Sea Works in Israel and the Arab Potash Company in Jordan that have been operating since the time of the British mandate Under the sea there is a hole an installation that explores other ways to reduce the need for adding nutrients to the soil while still growing population As a setting, a series of 25 suspended tiny surfaces map out the 5,000 seacoast of the Dead Sea On top of them a climate for performative dinner takes place Climate for aims to consider a new climatic season Different from the now obsolete cycles of spring, summer, autumn and winter climatic events may span over days, months, years or centuries and here we really try to think of how a process that is well evident today when you walk into the supermarket basically you get all foods year round and this idea of seasonal agriculture, seasonal food has become a very niche practice So, climate for sets out to frame the new season of food production and consumption that are appearing due to those human induced climatic events It reacts to current drought desertification water pollution flash floods or invasive species So the idea behind climate for is to adapt our diet to a globally financialized landscape what to eat during periods of severe scarcity of water or what to eat when there is an increased salinity of the soil So to a certain extent climate for aims to develop a change in form of eating that functions as infrastructure It questions also the geographical implications behind the making of climatic alterations and the pressures they enforce on local inhabitants Different regions are structured nationally by heat waves and cycles of droughts that can last for several years More recently the fertile state of California has suffered the consequences of excessive irrigation which in many cases has led to the unexpected appearance of dangerous sinkholes around overlay irrigated areas In times the water scarcity rather than local can promote rather than local organic vegetables crops requiring less water like millet, barley, lentils and pomegranates All these could slow down the exhaustion of aquifers much more effectively However, under the imminent threat of buildings collapsing over cavities underground dry farming could provide a form of reshaping landscapes during periods when water is scarce But is there a real scarcity or is it a matter of an ethical distribution of available resources Since the popularization of the term after World War II the certification has become a political tool to mobilize action against based on the propagation of fear especially as administrators of development in the African continent needed a problem dramatic enough to legitimize mitigation and control of both space and people Inheritance from arid regions did not suffer from aridity They knew how to flexibly adapt and freely move by making their foraging, agricultural and hunting practices migrate with the seasons But once that mobility is stopped the desert is starting becoming a problem Residents of the Sahel have been blamed for decades for land misuse while main corporations have been offsetting their environmental damage through a greenwashing restoration program The desert has become a new frontier for climate related investments controversially linked to IMS loans and pollution offsetting trade-offs coming from the upper north as well as new public structures that collide with pastoralists and nomadic constructions of space So despite having been described as an ungovernable landscape the edge of the Sahara is a region spanning over 700,000 km from east to west coast of the African continent that can shed a bit of light on how to deal with nature and urbanity in a post-colonial context In 2010 a pan-African alliance of the countries along the Sahel committed to planting a great green wall to slow down desertification at the transnational level This 10-mile wide forestation project consisted of subsistence species requiring little irrigation ranging from palm trees to cashew trees or marina trees Plan for then thinks that these woodstabs can serve as a form of infrastructure in the face of a world-shifting run-and-going series of climate alterations This is what we are going to taste in a moment Our climate war desert supper made with marina for the dream So some of the empire-remain shop explorations revolved around these five ideas speculating on the selling of the remains of the British Empire in London today devaluing anti-croach, pan-African access, commercial extinction lack of choice and the appearance of new climatic systems As the empire-main shop closed its doors in November 2016, the afterlife of the project continues in the creation of a franchise agreement or a counter-franchise agreement In that way, the empire-main shop can open in other parts of the world as a platform to respond to post-colonial context elsewhere Using the research, work and knowledge developed so far in the empire-main shop, the franchise is ready for institutions, collectives or individuals to set up a counterpart and investigate the power structures still in place The upcoming book that we'll discuss a bit later today about the project will work both as a documentation of the project so far but at the same time as an annual this platform will respond and disseminate to colonial infrastructures and is still permeating in society Also, if someone wants to filter up here as you grab your paper A incredibly expensive research project The empire-main shop was also a big curatorial project and you've brought in lots of other people doing interesting and relevant research as well into the project and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how it operated as both a research and supported each other So I think for us, from the outset, starting to do research about such a topic it became evident that it can never kind of be an encompassing project, right? There was like no way to hold a conversation to really kind of tie together kind of the entirety of the question around the empire and basically through the process we came in touch and we're in conversation with many people where it became kind of very informative for the whole process of thinking and producing and kind of moving through the different stages of research and in that way I think more than kind of a curatorial project, I think it was a way for us to set up a platform that kind of enough this conversation to continue within the shop So in that sense I don't I mean there were kind of many ways in how things sense beside each other but not so much I think was a kind of thinking about as a curatorial project when all of the kind of edges and seams have to be put together in a very kind of smooth way but actually yeah, really giving people people that have informed the project beforehand the opportunity to create an intervention which might have been a contribution but at the same time might have been a disruption to the proposition right or kind of to the question we put forward I think that is interesting because we from the beginning we never thought of it as a curatorial project it was more we want to look into this issue and then who knows about this, who knows about that we would kind of make a project about that so he is involved more naturally and that's also why we struggled a lot on the formats of presentations or projects or contributions and we, because we work quite against say like this is performance this is a structure, this is a talk this is an academic paper and instead what was important for us is that actually duration didn't really matter because how would you classify an academic paper that lasts for 10 hours what would it be a performance that lasts for 2 seconds and all those questions that we hadn't thought about before actually became part of the way in which we structured the platform through the open agenda so rather than through discipline or background it was more this agenda these are contributions and basically the question I think other than in terms of the curatorial is what is the agency of each one of the kind of interventions rather than kind of the essence of the project I think the agency of this is something super important that we should talk about like Jesse, thank you for that amazing presentation I think it exhibited your incredible I think generosity of spirit but also sort of generosity of perceptiveness you'll see things that really matter for the world and I think that's really great to sort of follow though on this sort of research about this question it's interesting to me that this platform that has diversity of protagonist as it gets refracted through y'all as speakers it achieves a certain coherence and I'm struck by your use of active and it seems like it's really central to the proposition that rather than sort of undertaking a survey that resemble the scientific or anthropological or any of these kind of sort of world making schemas that we have known in academia that you insist on the anecdote as the sort of simple scene of action to the point that the the company is sort of amazing on this like just set of stories or sort of fables of illiterals and technology so I'm curious about if you've reflected on the kind of incredible like specificity and eos secrecy of the stories that you select and how those three might crack open the sort of like the larger questions because like there's no shortage of large questions like its environment the planet and the illiterals and like it's a huge topic but with such amazingly precise entry points I think yet it's really the anecdote for us it's quite crucial because usually we come across this absurd, nonsensical sometimes this sort of news like with different places and then you start thinking how can this happen is so historical, like how could this happen and then you start, you take that as a serious kind of exploration that okay, let's go back for instance with the murders and the killings because of this planet actually was never even in this competition, like how can this happen and then you start putting the thread back to understand the whole system that has led to that anecdotes or anecdotal events to happen and I think at the same time and like I do, I mean I think it really kind of follows a lot of the projects and there's also in this kind of anecdotes I think for us there's like a lot of points come out of it that there's a lot of very big politics that are done right and kind of there's a lot of forms of common abuse or government, kind of forms of governance that are taken place and in that sense I think in many ways it's like how to or how to find other ways to enter into kind of a more canonical kind of ways of seeing the world because at the end of the day, yes, you can say okay this story of Japanese not me it's like, it's an anecdote right, so two people have killed and not that I'm kind of not taking seriously the fact that three people died because of it at the same time, I think what it kind of exposes is something much larger and it kind of opens up a glimpse to how kind of neo-neberism in the face of like the housing crisis in Europe is operating today and that is I think where it becomes like a very valid and serious question I mean, after both the novel and I'm still thinking and maybe we could talk more about sort of agency or whether how much you would sort of claim an activist side to the project because the way you sort of articulate the agency for not me to sort of assess these systems of financialization or would you take that in your own right because you suggest almost that you can begin to like weaponize the not me and like how far we sort of go imagining the outcome of this project and I think to me that leads to maybe the question of how well as a media practice like what are your sort of vectors of disseminating this how do you see yourselves addressing a sort of a public that learns from these things because I do think I really believe that the question is like nothing less than changing cultural behaviors I think that it seems to me that that's the addition so I'd love to hear some more yeah, well we can start with Chris but I think some of the kind of interactions that we have with people when we're sitting there for eight hours in front of the shop windows and like hundreds of people passing by looking at us looking at our assets so some people that was with whom we had consultation they were saying oh wow but then if I hit my landlord can I put Japanese up with the property I don't know or who? yeah or if I want to buy a house one that actually a detective has Japanese up with the garden so then I can use it as a kind of a tactic to bargain the price that we know if you case with the people that did that actually bargain with the owner so listen I know that has Japanese up with even if you're not telling me so I'm waiting to pay you more in cash because I know that you can play your role in those kind of bargaining and yeah look for tactics yeah in that sense I think yes there's kind of if you come back to the question of agency then I think there's the projects kind of move from the kind of more a conceptualization of a field and of the question and then yes how do you disseminate it and how it becomes a form of media as well and in that sense I think today we were speaking about more in the regards to climate for we were speaking more of the kind of speculative scenario when you come for a dinner and you're kind of faced with all of these different climatic scenarios or climatic seasons and kind of foods that respond to it and it kind of takes a look into the future right but at the same time what is happening now with the project and this is kind of how we are developing the work at the moment is that we're actually starting to work in very localized scenarios so actually from here we're going straight to the Isle of Skye in Scotland where we are working now on a project the Isle of Skye is one of the biggest producers of farm salmon in Scotland which is like a billion pound industry and basically an industry that has been for the past 30 years completely destroying the ocean all around Scotland and this year was the last year sorry 2016 was the first year that there has been a moratorium on the fishing of wild salmon because the numbers have basically depleted total zero so then kind of thinking through this idea of climate war and the idea of polluted ocean we're basically working now on a long term project for a few years to really think like how would you start really thinking about this project seriously and how would you not kind of look at various scenarios with focus on one and what kind of infrastructures and architectures and spaces have to be made and what kind of cultural behavior has to be kind of adopted for a certain period of time to kind of rearrange the whole space so in that sense what you were saying we also pushed it a lot the city of climate at the regions as a cultural construct and in the case for example the lionfish we see another anecdote that we really like so we were talking to someone in the Department of Environment there and they were saying how lionfish became extremely basic they had a lionfish all over the island it had come from Florida to the Bahamas that is all over the Caribbean and basically it did every single fish to the point that in Ireland there used to be thousands of different species now there is one and it's impossible to keep it or to poison it and the only way to do it is through fishing it with a hook or a spider and then it was this kind of cultural shift where they came up with a brilliant idea to almost kind of declare not officially but to a certain extent declared an international dish for people to start fishing but also for people to win prizes in different tournaments so you have to present who fished the most amount of lionfish in a day and then slowly slowly the restaurants started every lionfish and today it came to a point that really when you go to the Cayman Island you can get lionfish in almost every restaurant and I think again this is like a very anecdotal story but what is I think incredibly important that what has happened through the 20th century mostly is that food has become kind of something or an object that we have to preserve and it's kind of a heritage that has to be kind of carried into the future now for me this is a really big kind of question because if we are kind of acknowledging that we are living through a time of transformation how can we think of kind of carrying something with us from history kind of down through generation and generation without kind of completely thinking about like transforming it as well so that since the idea of climate war would really try to think of a heritage with an exploration date right and how like something like lionfish yeah after 10 years once sharks have learned that they can actually eat it and not just like swim beside it which is like so it's starting to happen then you would never eat another lionfish in your life On the subject of media I would like to ask one of the things that's I think really interesting is that you opened a store rather than an exhibition and it was a store on Baker street and you also had the real estate agency and in a lot of ways by not operating in these like more traditional spaces you have like increased the accessibility of your work even like just like in the anecdote that's the same thing in a lot of ways and I was wondering if you could speak eventually those choices The site was a big task where to find it and it would not have worked on Baker Street but we wanted it in the central part of London because of all these connections to the city and global finance and also because we thought it would not make sense to have the industrial space in a 325 neighborhood or in Scotland so first of all it was very important to find a very strange place on Baker Street is with a lot of people but also people would not know how to take it but in that sense it really what it allowed is to kind of like multiple people to enter from very different entry points and what happened with the value in real estate agencies that I mean that was like when anthropology was being done because like once you start people are proceeding real estate, the things that happen life is sometimes better than the books and you really have first of all the gender division was incredible you would have all of these couples walking down the streets and always the man would go to the window when the woman would just continue walking down the street and would be standing in front of the man and the woman would be like you know and then of course some people kind of understood the joke and kind of smiled and they continued other people would come in but it really allowed kind of various conversations that I think if in the frame of an exhibition wouldn't have happened and I think the same way with this idea of selling things so it was the same there was no object within the shop that you can come and sell as an art work like nothing was inside like oh I really love this like fountain you know can I put it in my living room like how much does it cost no you can only get like grammar so it was at the time really trying to kind of push the limits I think of how consumption is done and kind of how it proceeded how we engage with it and yeah in that sense in the case of the real estate agency we had actually across the street like the proper one we were in a kind of detention like having to oppose and things with the similar display so that was also a different friction there or if for instance we sell pretty things where they came sell pretty things down the road those were our favourites sell pretty things kind of this huge upscale sale barn is here and basically one day like it was like after the shop opened suddenly like these type people from the research team of course like everyone has like research teams today so like type people from the research team of self-reaches like walking to the shop and they're like what are you doing here what are you selling and they're like oh the stools I love them do you have a measuring tape can they measure how big they are at the research the research team started measuring of the stools and taking notes but yeah I think it was I think very interesting how exactly kind of what kind of attention and conversation in drawing we have some excellent audience here so Bray to open it up whenever y'all have questions this includes the family family question I have an instance I've got a family question so what's in the cake so the cake is a what we spoke about towards the end is the moringa it's a cake made out of moringa and basically moringa is one of the plants that is being used now to create a buffer zone at the edge of the sanera there's a way basically to prevent the the extensive kind of transformation of the sanera downwards into southern parts of Africa what actually is North America in North America it's a very long story it originated in Japan and survived the volcanic ashes of mountains there and it's from the family of the rhubarb and the thing is it thrives in Japan for volcanic ashes because it's very sturdy and resistant and that's why in the UK whenever there was this kind of post-industrial landscape after the collapse of many industries in the 70s if you would not take care of any wastelands basically it was the first plant that started spreading all over and basically it survives in this kind of cadmium soil and in that sense what happened in the 70s was like the whole urban transformation of the UK and the whole social housing movement that was taking place in the 50s and 60s it basically with all of the construction and like making landfills moving land from one place to another and they just spread it all over the country so it was kind of really through the urban transformation of the country the plant kind of disseminated all over the country how? how was it? no it was it was because I think especially in projects like that it's very important for us that it's something when you're really trying to challenge the perception of someone and kind of giving them something that they perceive as a threat it has to be palatable it has to be something that would be consumable but it wasn't trying to make it disgusting it was the best ice cream you could I will say that I saw the sea metal or the vessel that you made the cocktails from that I saw as a threat I think Jacob had a question I was curious about the book and the possibility you mentioned or the part of it is geared toward possibility of making more of these elsewhere kind of like I forget what the term you used but the possibility of thinking of these things as an anti-franchise or something like that opening up so I'm curious about what that means and I presume that the possibility exists where to consider other post-colonial situations other vampires obviously so I'm curious about kind of a guidebook that could be for clients on the lessons you've learned here especially if we can go back to the anecdotes I'm curious how you start to open it up to other situations there's two parts in that can you please speak to the store front maybe two as a part of that so there's a part I would say part of the content and then a part related to structure so in terms of structure what was important for us was how do you come up with economic models to continue projects for the participants of the shop because some of the projects were starting to come up with amazing kind of inputs and we wanted to continue this kind of so in that sense the idea of the project would use kind of the royalty to keep producing work that would be kind of one of the conditions of the agreement, the franchise agreement for the person who opens it and in terms of content the other kind of condition that is part of the contract is that at least like half of the of the works that are on display have to respond to that traffic context so if the shop opens in Singapore it would relate to the context there or if it opens in Jamaica the same but also in kind of post-imperial contexts it relates to the structure colonial implications or French or Spanish so you don't define what of the post-imperial needs to be related to and what relating to it means and that's not the post-imperial I mean I think so it's changing more in terms of like the form and kind of the approach rather than exactly kind of binding it to a certain kind of era but I think kind of the way we're thinking of the book and what kind of literally is holding the book together is the contract for the franchise right so and the idea of kind of how this the contract really can become I mean again it's not going to be the table of contents right but how it's in a way allows you to kind of read through the book and kind of read through the contract in parallel right and then in the contract there are things like a window display it's a crucial part of the the program of this project and wherever it will open it has to have a window display it has to be set on a kind of above a central street in wherever it is even if it's a small town or a big city it doesn't matter and then yes there has to be a way to respond to the local context and work with local practitioners etc and yet have access to all of the knowledge and material and like website and structures that were already put in place thank you for the amazing presentation I was wondering more on the same topic regarding the contract for the franchise I was just curious I mean just trying to imagine having kind of codified such a like nuanced agenda in a way into language I don't know the use of anecdote the specificity of things the kind of sort of humor of things are there certain parts that you really like grappled with how do we write down the requirements for this and then also wondering like through that process that happened to put these individual projects into kind of a framework codified framework to actually kind of change how you thought about the product and in effect help your understanding of it where yeah I mean I think so there are kind of a few like the contract is a work that is still developing and I think in that sense yes there are many kind of things that cannot enter like exactly kind of you have to use like an amount of there although I think it's a very interesting idea like how do you approach that and I think yeah it's something that is interesting to harness but that might be kind of reflected from the content kind of outwards rather kind of from the structure like inwards at the same time I think with the question kind of with how this the contract is structured or kind of what is the extent of control we have over the project is something that for us we are really interested to kind of experiment with this web right because it's not that we see it as a project that wherever it goes now we have to be kind of the center kind of figures right and everything has to be kind of orchestrated around our research and work not the thought like we would be super excited if like an institution would come and say like hey like this is super interesting we would love to do it we have a set of curators here or whatever it may be and like they're going to lead the process and kind of would be there to guide or to give ideas or to maybe then commission a work like a new project from us right but not necessarily we have to be kind of the ones that are like leading it throughout because I think yeah if you really want to question how this would operate kind of in other contexts there is like I think for me it's quite an interesting idea to see how it takes on so a life of its own yeah in that sense is the obviously the franchise it has to be the same and we will be always different everywhere can I ask also sort of following on that question I wonder if you have a sort of almost a kind of spirit philosopher who sort of guide in your poems because I am really struck by both the question of which empire is the question of sort of how you would be in today it is really striking the way you take the sort of material culture of colonialism and you sort of import it into the precedent in certain ways and you both distance yourself from some of it and then sort of on others like actually sort of performing the empire and so I'm really struck by that I mean I know that I think we're all fans of people like Michel Faire who argue that if we're going to intervene within the liberalism that we have to sort of use its tools against itself so it seems clear to me that you're a sort of counter practice in that sense and yet you sort of freely adopt the I suspect that maybe it wouldn't be an anti-franchise like you're claiming franchise not an anti-franchise you're using those devices in terms of how exactly you sort of position your idea about design and activism through politics but yeah totally we're very fans of Michel and I think the framework that he's been putting together about how to operate within his neoliberal condition is quite likely for us in the sense that especially within this shift from the relationships between employer and employee to investment and how we all become infestees and hence forms of resistance that were attached to the form of economic productivity that links more to factories in the 19th century whereby workers would stop in for the factories, stop the factory and demonstrate etc do not work any longer so how do we embrace the current structures and try to operate within them but at the same time outside then I think also another big question is kind of a question of the limits of governmentality and I think in that sense I think James Scott is another person of this I think his work is quite important for our thinking and yeah we need to what he writes on the far back instance but yet how today what are the limits of government and what are the limits of control and how to use those limits and live within governmentality and yet kind of have freedoms operate kind of beyond that thank you that was fantastic I have a question of the question of the anecdote that when you start your research I'm very interested also in the role that you play in your work and I think you are great scholars and I would want to know more how you base those so you plan them as essential to your research yeah I think I think it's no but it was a very instrumental thing and I think I think my chance of life also in the idea of the anecdote because I think basically yes you kind of gain access to certain questions and especially here that we were dealing with a very extensive geography and territory yeah the fact of going to places and trying again in a few weeks I mean it's not that we spent like a year in Barbados right but yeah even in a couple of weeks to really try and understand kind of what are the challenges that various kind of economies government or like artists and architects are facing and I think we use a lot as a research base they can enter like a method of interviews and we speak to a lot of other people and kind of in between supplemented with archival research and with the like with reading etc and then kind of out of a full trip of Barbados you know in Barbados for two weeks where you kind of encounter a ton of different material like one project come out and it's kind of and I think this is where it's kind of the anecdotes kind of almost epitomizes like a condition that like runs across many many different structures and status of society but for us it's kind of an emblem of kind of a present condition that is at stake right and how then you can start thinking of that like to intervene into various races so I think what is interesting about these trips is that it almost reverses the logic of methodology of what we are used to also ourselves because to a certain extent the logic would be that you choose something extremely specific and then you go there a hundred times the traditional anthropology and you really know a group of people where they live in but when they're getting ready and I think for us it's almost like the opposite that we go to a place with extremely generalistic curiosities and try to learn from very different people we interview like from agronomers to politicians to farmers to very different groups of people and then at the end maybe there's one anecdote that is extremely relevant and that allows us to start connecting all these logs kind of it's like almost like zooming out from that extremely generalistic and general and yeah I think for me it's also a very big question today when you're kind of thinking of things in the face of kind of change and like how do we operate under these conditions like how what kind of limits of discipline also we are faced because of that and how kind of and also because of like the expertise we one has to have in order to operate today in the world like I think we teach in an architecture department the world of college of art and you see that when you think about like the students' projects it's not enough to teach them how to design you know I think if you graduate today from school only knowing how to design whether it's a building or a home or an urban kind of fabric it's not enough because there are like so many pressures and kind of stakeholders and and phenomena that are taking place constantly that for us it's really interesting all the time to think how you can yeah address all of these and in that sense yes I think we're like very poor historians you know or like to be absolutely best you know I think it's a crucial question to ourselves at the time and we need to challenge it also to ourselves how is this how does this make sense how do we make it reverse when it's apparently over the place so it's this constant exploration any further questions I think to me like what I find so profound in your approach is that I love the way that you find these sort of devices so that you connect things across scales I think in this talk the calorie was one the idea that the sort of the calories the sugar came with the calories and certainly the other was the idea that eating this infrastructure and I think that that within this talk and within that infrastructure I love how immobilization is active and therefore it's the thing that helps us find slippages kind of potential cracks within that infrastructure the sort of mechanization of life that we go with it all the time so with that unless there's any last moment interventions please join me in thanking our generous