$20 Suggested Donation
Join Kate Rich in exploring new imaginaries and conversations around Feral Trade, an art endeavor and long-range economic experiment, using the spare carrying capacity of the art world to transport and transact other vital goods, outside commercial systems.
Kate Rich is a trade artist and feral economist, born in Australia and living in Bristol, England. In the 1990s she co-founded the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing an array of critical information products including economic and ecological indices, event-triggered webcam networks and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau's work has been exhibited internationally in museum, educational and corporate contexts. Since 2003 she has run Feral Trade, an art endeavor and long-range economic experiment, using the spare carrying capacity of the art world to transport and transact coffee, olive oil and other vital goods, outside commercial systems.
Kate is part of the finance team at Bristol's volunteer-run Cube Microplex, system administrator for the Irational.org art server collective, and a member of the FoAM network of transdisciplinary labs. At FoAM, she is setting up the Institute for Experiments with Business (Ibex), an emergent research entity whose remit is to think about business as a medium for generative experiments.
In other collective affiliations she is a member of the Community Economies Institute (CEI), a group of scholars, artists, activists and practitioners from around the world who foster thought and practice to help communities survive well together. She is economist in residence with the Sail Cargo Alliance, an assembly of traders, brokers and ship owners who are reinventing the ancient art of running cargo on wind-propelled ships. And she was recently engaged as feral business advisor for the lumbung kios working group, organised by Indonesian art collective ruangrupa for the documenta fifteen international art event. Kate's ongoing preoccupation is to move her art practice deeper into the infrastructure of trade, administration, organisation and economy. To this end, she is currently working on establishing the curriculum for the Feral MBA, a radically different kind of training course in business for artists and others.