On Wednesday night, braving the still-wintery Vancouver rain, I attended a sparsely-populated but lively presentation by Australian-born media Artist Kate Rich at the Western Front artist-run centre. Kate talked about a variety of projects, from pirate radio for geese to open-source cola recipes, but her focus was on a project investigating micro-economies called Feral Trade. The project has utilitarian beginnings – Ms. Rich was the bar manager at Cube Cinema in Bristol and was interested in sourcing coffee to sell from the bar. Rather than follow traditional import/export patterns, she decided to take advantage of her connections in the globe-trotting art world. She knew someone who knew someone who knew a coffee grower, and she was able to use these connections to arrange the first shipment (twice-removed). This started a practice of importing and distributing coffee and other products along social networks – a system which she has named Feral Trade.
Each shipment of product along the network is meticulously documented on her website, where you can find details and waybills for every shipment that has been made since 2003. A custom-made visualization applet allows for the construction of network diagrams showing the routes that these shipments have taken as they find their way from producer to buyer.
Shipments are also documented photographically. Here, a delivery of coffee is accepted at the Tate Modern:
Kate positions this project as a critique of the commodity-based art market, and in this way, Feral Trade is quite successful. There’s a certain amount of irony in artists couriering bags of coffee in their carry-on — the system is a kind of rich people’s caravan that carries goods in expensive handbags and is funded in a large part by government grants. This idea of using an international network of artists (who spend far too much time on planes) as vessels for commerce is clever and funny.
At the same time, there is a suggestion that this Feral Trade system could be a viable alternative to large-scale trade practices, offering a kind of a ‘crowd-sourced’ distribution system. Indeed, much of the discussion after Kate’s talk on Wednesday seemed to embrace the network as a real functioning model for trade. I am skeptical of this – certainly a system that relies on personal airline travel doesn’t play nicely within a local-first, green comsuption world. Still, the project is an interesting one and I was glad to have attended – umbrella in tow.
