Cooking Sections & Sakiya: In the Eddy of the Stream

In the Eddy of the Stream draws attention to the breakdown of ecosystems through the removal of plants and the ensuing long-term harm to people, communities, and other species. The exhibition brings together the work of Cooking Sections and Sakiya who create their own eddies; sheltered areas where water flows back upstream against the current. The two collectives’ work stimulates debate and offers tools for addressing historical damage and the resulting ecological crisis.

Through the lens of plants and the politics embedded in their growth, containment and conservation, this exhibition stems from the history of land struggles in Scotland and Palestine. ‘A fish from the river, a staff from the forest, a deer from the mountain’ (from Gaelic: breac à linne, slat à coille ‘s fiadh à fìreach) has long captured the fight against the enclosure of common land, and yet the thinking behind this saying seems more critical than ever. The different projects undertaken by the artists forge new alliances between humans and other species across changing territories.

The installations, performances and materials in this exhibition challenge how botany has been used as a mechanism of control and how it might identify new horizons. From the banning of foraging practices to rewilding and waste-landing debates, this exhibition puts forward new ways of understanding and repositioning ourselves.

Cooking Sections is a practice that examines the systems that organise the world through food, and how food can be used to explore, trace and advance climate justice. Their work is dedicated to understanding the aftermath of the extraction of natural resources in contested landscapes. They use site-responsive installations and performance to explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics.

Sakiya is an academy, a residency programme, a research hub, and a farm located in Ein Qiniya, a small agricultural village seven kilometres west of Ramallah, in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory. Like most of the West Bank’s open spaces and natural resources, the area in which Sakiya operates is prohibited for Palestinian use, owing to restrictions of Israeli civil and security control. By grafting local traditions of self-sufficiency onto contemporary art and ecological practices, Sakiya seeks to create new narratives around relationships to land, knowledge-production, and commoning.

In the Eddy of the Stream is an Edinburgh Art Festival 2022 partner exhibition.