Must-See: Cooking Sections Map the Afterlife of Waves

This review is part of a series of Must-See shows, in which a writer delivers a snapshot of a current exhibition

Amid settler expansion along South Africa’s coastal stretch of Cape St Francis, the construction of a new marina in 1968 saw the region’s dunes altered and its canals dredged. While, from the 1950s, apartheid steadily erased the Indigenous presence from this land, now, with the delta silted and sand flows cut, two major waves native to these waters have also been effaced. 

Eleven such stories of extinct waves are displayed in ‘Waves Lost at Sea’, a new exhibition by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe (together, Cooking Sections) at Centro Botín in Santander, northern Spain. The show weaves together accounts from around the world of coastal engineering and ecological erasure: from a wave that vanished from the Basque town of Mundaka in 2003, due to sand dredging during a shipyard expansion, to one destroyed by a 1970s port, built under Spanish rule in Western Sahara, where the waters were used for phosphate trading.

Through sound and performance, the single, eponymous installation Waves Lost at Sea (2025) explores how oceanographically recognized movements of water can be eradicated by the human hand. In each case, industrial, commercial and territorial interests have led to the devastation of marine systems and their surrounding communities. Within the gallery, a series of 60-metre-long steel slinkies hang side by side from the ceiling, suspended at each end. A performer moves among them, manipulating the spiralling cables with her body, sending waves through the material. Staged to a soundtrack composed by Duval Timothy, the movements alternate between fluid and frenetic, embodying the varied, volatile motion of water itself. 

The installation is made more powerful by the backdrop of Santander Bay, visible through the floor-to-ceiling windows that span the gallery’s back wall. The view of the water is soothing and serene – but as the performer nudges, bounces, rattles and whacks the giant slinkies, viewers recall humanity’s relentless impact on seas and oceans. The ripples and jolts coursing through the metal engage but also unsettle: they reverberate in memory of what is washed away by the forces of extractivism, commerce and industrialisation.

Cooking Sections’s ‘Waves Lost at Sea’ is on view at Centro Botín, Santander, until 1 March 2026

_{Main image: Cooking Sections, Waves Lost at Sea (Las olas perdidas), 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Centro Botín; photograph: Lourdes Cabrera}