Feral Trade Tea Party and Raffle

Kate Rich will introduce Feral Trade, serve ferally-traded tea and coffee and conduct a raffle of the Feral Trade Hamper – a seasonal selection of goods sourced and transported over social networks. Feral Trade is an artist-run grocery business, trading since 2003. Goods are run outside the global market, using the surplus freight potential of commuter, vacation and culturally-funded travel to transport groceries intercity. Preliminary attempts to map this terrain show a constellation of complex connections - an intricate time-space system covering thousands of miles. Products assembled in the Feral Trade Hamper (Xmas 08) have been hand-freighted in from all corners of the social/cultural networks and include tea from Bangladesh, grappa from Croatia, cacao from Brazil and sweets from the world’s newest nation Montenegro.

A hamper is a place where diverse grocery items can congregate. Traditionally, in times of trouble, persons or community groups donate a hamper of food or other household necessities to needy people. Here, stockists from third world and subsistence economies have been grouped together to provide relief for the West European food shopper, currently suffering from degraded supermarket shopping on offer. Each product is accompanied by biographical information that records relations with producers and couriers, transit conditions, route information and the bounteous detail of delay, seizure, communications and other failures which present a persistent challenge to the assumed smooth transit of goods. If you would like to join us for this event, please RSVP by 10 November 2008