Feral Trade's Packet Network
Kate Rich is a Bristol based artist who for ten years has been running
Feral Trade (feraltrade.org) a global trading network working with
people's incidental carrying power. Social networks here provide, not
sets of spindly lines and nodes as graphs for the extraction of value,
but a means of hefting foodstuffs in suitcases, rucksacks and bags as
people travel. Feral trade is currently a means of circulating coffee,
blue corn, agave syrup, mescal, chocolate, olive oil and the syrup with
which to produce 'Cube Cola', an open source cola devised for the cube
cinema. The fascinating Waybills of Feral Trade transported goods
provide a log of the transit of each object, mixing logistical
information with reminiscences, photos and personal data, making another
map of infrastructures, informal trade and data-structures as they move
through idiosyncratic channels around the world.
(This interview was carried out by email in mid-2013 by Silvia Mollichi
and Matthew Fuller.)
SM: The Feral Trade website mentions its use of the surplus potential
of social, cultural and data networks for the distribution of goods. Is
it possible to relate this surplus or excess to the slowed-down rhythm
and non-linear routes your traded items transit through? Would you say
that your business re-defines questions of efficiency?
KR: Yes I think so. Or replaces one idea of efficiency with another one.
Right now I am shipping 6 bags of green tea from Fujian province to MoMA
in New York, via around 5 other institutions and private homes in China,
UK and USA, which are acting as depots or transit points. Another pack
of tea arrived from India to my flat in Bristol and then toured the Lake
District before passing back through my flat departing for Heathrow
Airport, where it had touched down from India weeks before, to fly to
New York in someone else's baggage. Both these shipments were actually
super-efficient. The products got delivered to their exact destinations,
they were enjoying not just frictionless but fruitful passage,
hitchhiking on existing travel or at the most diverting their couriers a
couple of blocks, so it's efficiency along completely different lines
than streamlined or containerised cargo. The loops, which occur when an
item passes through the same space twice can actually enhance the
product's value in terms of its CV.
SM: A widespread network of relations, especially among art and business
people, is what makes Feral Trade possible. Yet, your Internet database
mentions the people participating in the project, its essential human
component (the chain of sender, receiver and courier/s), mostly just by
name. The relations amongst them, or their interests, this key layer of
the infrastructure, are often left to the intuition and conjecture
based on brief couriers reports. Could we say that the main focus is
kept on the transiting object and its route? Is there a specific reason
for this, other than perhaps privacy?
KR: Feral Trade is essentially not web 2.0 - it anyway preceded facebook
and I would suggest presents a radically different vision of what real
social networks are like. The database is set up specifically to not
harvest social goods. So if you search for transactions by agent you
could see all shipments that that particular individual has been
involved in, but you would have to then draw your own conclusions. In
some ways it's a cynical database because it encourages the futility of
trying to capture social networks, over and above any notion of
individual privacy.
The focus of the project is actually the load-bearing capacity of the
network - how can it handle materials? - along with an interest in the
agency of things, which effectively hands off subjectivity to the
travelling grocery object. So the product gets the full joined-up
biography, the agency of the couriers comes out through only partial
narratives, chopped up.
SM: Couriers do not necessarily know each other or you directly and
Feral Trade constitutes a chance to become part of a permanently
expanding network. Whats interesting though, is the contingent nature
of the network itself. During their brief meetings, couriers get to
know each other while swapping their roles, shifting from the receiver
of the object to its giver. Yet, the only thing they have in common
might be exactly the transiting object, positioned in between the two of
them. Are the dynamics of these odd encounters something you are
interested in?
KR: The network is more like permanently drifting than expanding.
Couriers come and go, some take on frequent and huge loads, others are
intermittent, but the network has settled in at its own scale. It flies
in the face of for example facebook's proposition that social networks
can just scale up indefinitely.
I thought about it recently as a normal courier system, like DHL, but
without any actual infrastructure. So no wages, uniforms, fleet,
schedules, forms to fill out (other than the online
