Feral Trade

70kg coffee sacks in tres guerras truck trailer Heath Bunting coffee courier briefcase Coffee to station All Feral Trade shopping departs Oaxaca bus station Furtherfield Gallery coffee delivery London Euston to Manchester Picadilly

2003–ongoing

Feral Trade (import-export) has been trading goods over social networks since 2003. The word ‘feral’ describes a process that is wilfully wild as in pigeon, as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). Feral Trade concentrates on small-scale releases of migrant groceries, sourced direct from their suppliers and circulated using the surplus freight capacity of social, commuter, vacation and cultural traffic. An underground freight network at least as reliable as DHL.

For Trade Show 01 Kate sets up a Feral Trade depot at Eastside Projects, with coffee directly imported from Mexico and to be further distributed through social connections only. A Feral Trade Café with a broader range of produce and a series of events will open at Eastside Projects in January 2014.

For Trade Show at RADMIN, Feral Trade presents a towering inventory backlog of olive oil from Extremadura, Spain, traded entirely through social connections and transported across the Bay of Biscay on the Dutch engineless ship Nordlys. All stock must go.

 

Feral Trade is run by Kate Rich.
Read an interview with Matthew Fuller in Wired Magazine here.

Related Events

Weblink

www.feraltrade.org

About

Kate Rich is an Australian-born artist and trader. In the 1990s she moved to California to work 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 in academic, scientific and museum contexts. At the turn of the century she headed east to Bristol, UK, where she launched Feral Trade, a grocery business and underground freight network.

Feral Trade forges new ‘wild’ trade routes across hybrid territories of business, art and social interaction. She is currently moving deeper into the cultural infrastructure, developing protocols to define and manage hospitality, catering, finance, sports and survival in the cultural realm.

Selected Projects and Exhibitions

2013
Media-archaeology of the Irational.org server disk, Leuphana University, Luneburg, Germany
Cube-Cola Trading Post, Brighton Digital Festival, Brighton, UK
Here Come the Drones, Furtherfield Gallery, London, UK
Exchange Café, MoMA, New York, USA

2012
World Portable Gallery Convention ups sticks and moves for 1 night only to WWTWO Gallery, Montreal, Canada
Feral Trade Café, World Portable Gallery Convention, Eyelevel Gallery, Halifax, Canada
Cube-Cola Assembly Line in Hack the City, Science Gallery Dublin, Ireland
To be is to be perceived, Lux Artists’ Moving Image online exhibition, London, UK

2011

Hauntings, Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz, Austria
Feral Trade Café at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland
Beyond Surveillance, Brighton, Bracknell, Portsmouth, Hastings, UK