Art Metropole

#16216

Salmon: A Red Herring

Artist

Cooking Sections

Writers

Hannah Landecker, Bruno Latour, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and David Zilber

Date

2020

Publisher

Isolarii

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

978-1-7350750-0-6

Size

7 × 10.8 cm

Length

176 pp

Genre

Creative Writing , Literary

Salmon: A Red Herring questions what colours we expect in our ‘natural’ environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of colour is changing as much as we are changing the planet. Adapted into the eponymous Turner Prize-nominated exhibition at Tate Britain, this book launched an international campaign against salmon farming.

In 2018, the artist/activist duo Cooking Sections heard of a sparrow that had turned bright pink on the Isle of Skye. So began an odyssey-like investigation into where it went, who was responsible, and what it signalled about its surrounding ecology. The pair spoke to fishermen in Mexico, where shrimp are turning grey, interviewed beekeepers in Brooklyn, who reported red-coloured honey, and investigated the Nornickel factory in Norilsk, Russia, where blue fog and black snow are industrial byproducts. Their findings are presented as a detective story for the era of environmentalism: a wildly inventive book and an exhibition at Tate Britain.

The book, Salmon: A Red Herring, shows how design can address the fragility of our food systems and how colour configures our economies. It is a visceral and visual examination of aesthetic manipulation, industrial farming, and environmental degradation, a seminal intervention in colour theory.

Forewords by Hannah Landecker, Bruno Latour, Hans Ulrich Obrist and David Zilber.