HTTP GALERY - LONDON

13 JUNE - 12 AUGUST 2009

Feral Trade Café, an art exhibition that is also a working café, opens at HTTP Gallery for 8 weeks during Summer 2009. Serving food and drink traded over social networks, Feral Trade Café by artist Kate Rich (AU) provides a convivial setting from which to contemplate broader changes to our climate and economies, where conventional supply chains (for food delivery and cultural funding) could go belly up.

Feral Trade uses social and cultural hand baggage to transport grocery items between cities, often using other artists and curators as mules. The exhibition includes a retrospective display of Feral Trade products (2003-present), alongside ingredient route maps, bespoke food packaging, video and other artefacts from the Feral Trade network.

The café will stock and serve a selection of Feral Trade goods from a menu including coffee from El Salvador, hot chocolate from Mexico and sweets from Montenegro, as well as locally sourced bread, vegetables and herbs. Along with their food and drink, diners will be served waybills detailing the socially facilitated transit of goods to their plate.

Feral Trade Café is the first element of three-year Media Art Ecologies programme, which aims to provide opportunities for critical debate, exchange and participation in emerging ecological media art practices, and the theoretical, political and social contexts they engage. The café will be host to events, initiated by Furtherfield.org and others, examining issues related to the Feral Trade and Media Art Ecologies projects, including a Media Art Ecologies networking day. Further info and dates (TBC).

On the occasion of the exhibition, Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are pleased to publish a new essay about the Feral Trade project by writer, artist and designer Femke Snelting of De Guezen (NL)

About Kate Rich

Kate Rich is an Australian-born artist & trader. In the 1990s she moved to California to work as radio engineer with the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecologic indices, event-triggered webcam networks, and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau's work has been exhibited broadly in academic, scientific and museum contexts. Restless at the turn of the century, she headed further east to take up the post of Bar Manager at the Cube Microplex, Bristol UK where she launched Feral Trade. She is currently moving deeper into the infrastructure of cultural economy, developing protocols to define and manage amenities of hospitality, catering, sports and survival in the cultural realm.

About Http Gallery

HTTP Gallery is based near North London's thriving Green Lanes area is dedicated space for media art. Furtherfield.org provides platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices in art, technology and social change. Furtherfield.org and HTTP Gallery are supported by Arts Council England, London.

http://www.http.uk.net/exhibitions/FeralTradeCafe/index.shtml