Video | Feral trade cafe: buying a narrative with your coffee.

July 27, 2009 by William Shaw
Filed under: William Shaw 

Feral Trade Cafe, London from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
A Flip camera video.

It’s interesting to see how the best media art moved on from the idea of creating networks in the virtual world, to seeing how those networks could affect the real world. Early net communities were full of idealism; how far does that ability to change the way we interact with each other spill over into the physical?

Earlier this year I talked to Amy Francheschini about the way ideas from her art practice as Futurefarmers informed the creation of Victory Gardens 2008+ in San Francisco. On Friday I dropped into North London’s HTTP Gallery, where media artists/gallerists Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett have created the Feral Trade Cafe implemeting artist Kate Rich’s Feral Trade network in their gallery space.

The cafe is sourced by real personal trade networks – artists bringing back Turkish Delight from Montenegro or discovering a source of honey in Rotherhithe. By using virtual space to record each trade route, every item you consume in the cafe comes with a  narrative. the bland, impersonal act of trade can suddenly come alive with stories, showing us how the items we buy under the normal rules of trade disconnect us from the world in which we live.

Read Ruth Catlow discussing Catlow and Garrett’s we won’t fly for art at the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre.

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Comments

3 Comments on Video | Feral trade cafe: buying a narrative with your coffee.

  1. Lois on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 12:16 pm

    2. Hi- Mute just posted a review of Feral Trade Cafe

    http://www.metamute.org/en/content/so_feral_it_s_tame

    In her recent show, Kate Rich harnesses the spare baggage capacity of the globe-trotting art world to create a ‘feral trade’ network of human scale exchange. John Millar has trouble suspending his disbelief

  2. jim on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 12:34 pm

    3. There
    is nothing bland or impersonal about trade once you get involved from
    the inside “Dealing”. I feel only compassion for those who can only trade
    as end users “consumers” this is not trade, as trade means a two way
    commodity deal, this is not business (busy ness) just consumption.
    Busyness should be fun for all concerned otherwise someone is being
    done, such as in consumer. Buy Sell Swop take back the power into you
    own life. I have not had a job for over thirty years so to speak, all I
    have done is bought sold and swopped, sometimes I have felt rich
    sometimes and other times poor but all that just comes from inside. Its odd but feeling un-materialistic can help whilst dealing.

    The concept behind Feral Trade is very subversive from society’s point of view because if we were all to start trading a lot of this market would be black in the
    eyes of the law, therefore criminal because society wants its cut.
    We need to encourage our kids to deal – my dealing started in the
    playground, my family didn’t have money (cash) so I traded stuff with
    other wealthy kids things such as Conkers, pens anything I could get
    that others desired, I was never short of Bob or two. I spent
    monies on school dinners, shoes and clothes. I learnt very early to
    love the freedom that dealing can afford.

  3. William Shaw on Thu, 24th Sep 2009 5:09 pm

    4. I’d agree with you Jim. Though it’s an interesting review by John Miller I think he’s missed the point. That smile of the trader that makes him cringe so much is something which is exposed by Feral Trade Cafe, not concealed. Feral Trade Cafe remains a participatory artwork, not an alternative trade network. It’s not a alternate economy but a meditation on existing economies and what they obscure.

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