Social Archive One: What's happening in our local community?
Social Archive One: Mary at Boundary estate lauderette
As part of our art and economies project, we wanted to focus on our local community. Invia is located in the East End in Shoreditch an area that has seen immigrant groups moving to the area historically, to artists moving in for the cheap rents, this evolved to government introduced regeneration and now the area is well on its way to total gentrification. So we invited members of the public and artist Shiraz Bayjoo to become social historians to document local histories and sentiments about the changing economies of the local area on film.
We found a group of leather makers who have been in the area since 1972 to a woman whose family have operated a tea stand since 1919. Will either of these two firmly established business survive the influx of high end shops to the local area? Watch: Social Archive One Films.
As part the local Shoreditch Festival, Iniva decided to make lucky dipping available in exchange for the making of an item. Over 5 hours we received a range of items, from poems to 3D objects. People of all ages took part and found the exchange fun and welcoming. See some of the photos from the day at: Lucky Dip Exchange.
Through our research on the subject of economy and how creative practices explore the subject I came across this rather interesting book. It is from 2008, so published right about the time that a few countries were facing a 'financial crises'. The book is edited by Benda Hofmeyr.
About the book from the publisher Jan Van Eyck Academie: Against the backdrop of Robert Greenwald’s documentary, WAL-MART. The High Cost of Low Price this multi-disciplinary yet cohesive volume calls upon intellectual, artistic and cultural producers themselves to oppose the progressive disappearance of the autonomous worlds of cultural production, cinema, publishing, etc., and therefore, ultimately, of cultural products themselves. It seeks to excavate the present-day workings of neo-liberal power and possible strategies of resistance. The contributors focus both on the documentary and artistic media used to reflect upon these phenomena as well as the actual socio-political and economic processes underlying them and following in their wake from the perspectives of art, design and theory (philosophy and social geography).
The Feral Trade Courier is a live shipping database for a freight network running outside commercial systems. It is a public experiment trading goods over social networks aiming that the passage of goods can also open up wormholes and routes between diverse social settings, along which other information, techniques or individuals can potentially travel. New products are chosen for their portability, shelf-life and capacity for sociability: feral trade goods in current circulation include the coffee from El Salvador plus grappa from Croatia, tea from Bangladesh and fresh sweets from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Kate Rich is an Australian-born artist & trader. At the turn of the century, she took 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.
