OPEN: 8am – 1pm, Saturdays in March, 2012
*only 2 more Saturdays to go..!!

On the edges of an organic farmer’s market in the thick of the city, a curatorium of thinkers, activists and dreamers is assembled to catalyse another space of exchange, a subterranean ‘dark market’ trading instead in radical economies, growing cultures and craft futures. Every Saturday morning in March, members of the curatorium will meet in the women’s toilet block (used outside these hours to store market infrastructure) for a series of tactical gatherings, making time for sharing old and new strategies – across disciplines, ways of thinking and practices – for rethinking and redirecting how we collectively sustain ourselves in this city, beyond the feel-good rhetoric of sustainability and eco-consumption.

From week to week, traces of these conversations will be made public in the underground men’s toilets, taking shape as an abandoned trade fair where market-goers may encounter such exotic offerings as a jar swap gang, a fermentation club, a radical reading room, an unreal estate agency and a nu-craft think tank. Making use of an antiquated hobby letterpress, the curatorium will also produce a collection of handmade communiqués advertising – and theorising – such emergent (or forgotten) practices.

Weekly conversations are directed by invited guests with expertise in a particular area. Week One was led by design theorist and educator Matthew Kiem, with guests John von Sturmer, Rebecca Conroy, Zanny Begg and David McNeill. Other participants have included Lara Thoms and James Arvanitakis. Future weeks’ attendees to be advised.

If you’re interested in anything in particular post-event, email us as we might still have it. Second-chance Sunday visitors by appointment.

Official spruik below:

Bill & George Studios

Level 1, 10-16 William St.

REDFERN

www.billandgeorge.org

www.thelibrarium.org

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“Didn’t know we had an annual fair? Neither did we! In keeping with the global financial crisis everywhere, Bill+George is holding a sale day at our warehouse on Saturday 11th February from 10am – 4pm. On this day we will be selling ourselves. (Hello, business opportunity!)

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Featuring: Grandma’s bric-a-brac & collectibles, third hand clothing, tarot card readings, karaoke massage, cheap haircuts, cupcakes, and genuine and original artworks.

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WITH FIONA WINNING, TESSA ZETTEL, KARL KHOE, PIA VAN GELDER, REBECCA CONROY, DAN MACKINLAY, SARAH MOSCA, JORDAN CLARKE, AND HARLEY STUMM, LIVE AT POET’S CORNER. ALSO HE WILL SELL HIS MUSIC.

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Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence. (Max Amsterdam)”

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In recent years, much of the work I’ve made in collaboration with Karl Khoe has been eaten. Not by us (the host rarely gets a chance), but by people who’ve been invited into an unusual space of exchange facilitated by the presence of food – dawn breakfast on a dry salt lake, nighttime afternoon tea in a 19th century basement, pikelets and sugarbag honey on the grass at Circular Quay. Of course all these situations have also produced conversation, often a particular kind of semi-directed discussion around where we are and by what circumstances we have arrived there. Food in this instance is an offering given to induce engagement; more than that, it is a point of entry into the parameters of the conversation: what do you need to sustain yourself, where can you find that in the place you’re in, what kinds of located knowledge have been overlooked or erased?

Earlier this month the place we were in was the dry salt lake, in Esperance, WA. Our journey there had something of Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo about it – weeks of persistent enquiry into the edibility of the landscape, in archives of photographs taken when the town was young (ladies with starched collars taking tea on the verandah, men picnicking with camel under the tasty mooja or Christmas tree), and negotiating to borrow articles of furniture and tableware that were once old grocer Daw’s or great-aunt Annie’s. Tramping over the salty mud with bentwood chairs and lace tablecloths and jars of pickled bloodroot or wattleseed-flecked madeleines, we were as knowingly out of place, and time, as those early settlers and indeed today’s residents whose food is trucked down from Perth. The meal itself, for guests who had given time to the foraging of its ingredients, was filmed as a series of frozen long-exposure poses, tablecloth flapping in the Esperance wind. In attendance were the feisty secretary of the wildflower society, the Indigenous pastor and community gardener, the renegade commercial plant hunter and the local high school art teacher. The imagined audience of their repast (alongside the more prosaic gallery-goer) was one Claude-Antoine-Gaspard Riche, naturalist with the d’Entrecasteaux expedition who found himself lost and disoriented on the shores of Pink Lake this very day 219 years ago, thirsty and hungry and surrounded by food he could not recognise.

On another level, the collaborative doing entailed by making and sharing food with such ad hoc and provisional participant ‘communities’ is a way of practicing practices that aren’t so familiar anymore, and that could perhaps be useful in the development of futuring (sustain-able) modes of living. Our first deployment of food preservation was Making Time (2010), an experimental gallery-kitchen at PICA where ideas drawn from design philosophy were swapped for help making street-gleaned mulberry jam. This came close on the heels of Gwago patabagun ___ We will eat presently (2010), a mobile pikelet cart with native bees producing honey to sweeten a program of site-based picnic discussions on the MCA’s front lawn. Most recently food and dialogue were key ingredients in The Delirious Bakery (2011), home to the Sweet Damper and Gossip Society whose weekly meetings teased out darker histories of how the Rocks have been lived, in relationship to broader geographies and timescales.

The trajectory of these projects – marking time to slow down and be attentive, accounting for pre-existing cultural knowledge – maps out a new kind of quality economy in which place, and our own (dis)placement within it, is a source of redirective potential. That is, by enacting other ways of feeding ourselves within specific micro-fabulist scenarios, we can begin to (bodily) reimagine our collective understanding of the worlds we inhabit, industrialised and elaborately designed but largely dysfunctional in any long-term sense, that in turn design our daily lives and the politicised spaces we eat in.

Sojourn in Esperance Bay will be exhibited as part of the IASKA spaced: art out of place exhibition & symposium at Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth, 4 Feb – 11 Mar 2012.

IMAGE CREDIT:
Sojourn in Espérance Bay, Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe, 2011. Production still.

Mouse played banjo blues in what also happens to have once been his great uncle’s chemist shop (!), Jason fronted up with a spectacular edible wildflower bouquet in a Xanthorrhoea (grass tree) stump, and we had visiting special guests from Perth, IASKA’s own Jan Teagle Kapetas and Marco Marcon.

Then this morning it was back in to open up for the Village markets, tucked in between the sausage man and the natural therapies ladies. A big day with an unending stream of curious visitors watching and wondering just what it was they were watching, and remembering times past and asking questions about other things too.

Jason and Minna of the Esperance Wildflower Society with his handiwork

Aforementioned sausage seller, pointing out edible root of fringe lily,
preserved in pink lake salt

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More photos will be added to this post soon…

No shortage of cameras: Dewi’s very beautiful bellows camera, his Rolloflex, the Super 8, and John’s high-tech digital video camera. Oh and our digital SLR, taking the photo.

A little after 6am, Mouse, Shannan, Peter and Jason enter stage left, with banjo, guitar and edible seasonal bouquet, all dressed impeccably for a time-warped meal in a dry salt lake.

More afternoon tea than dinner, we had on hand pickled bloodroot, wattleseed & lavender madeleines, bush bananas, pickled nasturtium pods and roasted sandalwood nuts. Two hours later we have several minutes of live posed ‘photographs’ of a scene that would certainly have startled the decidedly peckish and dessicated Frenchman some 219 years ago.

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A pair of Cape Barren Geese! Definitely a good omen.

Just about everything we’re using has been borrowed from people in town – tables, chairs, dogs, tea set, hats, parasol, trunks, super 8 cameras etc. Gathering such things in Esperance has been no mean feat, and only made possible by an inordinate amount of generosity and trust. We are very grateful and will feed you all with unusual treats.

There are however, a handful of items we’ve needed to acquire for the eventual exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre. Here they are, arranged with the Cannery’s own 16mm projector, looking not too dissimilar to an earlier proposed install sketch (below):

Note here the (French) stereoscope incorporated into a Cape Barren Goose mask, a thaumatrope installed atop the seagrass plant stand, and a film projector on the side table, projecting the lake dining ‘scene’ in which these objects have featured.

Sonny was keen to come along too and pick up some quandong seeds to try germinating for the community garden. They’re supposed to be eaten by an emu, but with google’s help and a little ingenuity and he’ll no doubt find a way.

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Though quandongs were sparse and mostly dried up, we visited rock art sites in hollowed out boulders, cooked up some herring Coral’s husband had caught in the Bay the day before, and found a load of bain, coastal pigface (‘hottentot fig’) fruits. You peel back the skin and there’s a little squishy fig-like treat inside, looking uncannily like one of those old-fashioned English boiled sweets.

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In a quiet moment sitting amongst the huge rocks at the top of the hill, we talked about the mooradji, ‘little people’ spirits that only show themselves to children, are playful and easily distracted. Peter says he’s heard of these at the school.

En route, little pink lakes are everywhere.

Paul has very high-tech equipment on his boat, which tells him where and how deep shoals of sardines are. We spied a huge sea eagle’s nest and some dolphins, and also shot our first reel of super 8 film on a camera borrowed from Phil, a local painter and sculptor. The whir of the film was almost tactile, and we have absolutely no idea how it will turn out.

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dolphins underfoot / Passing the port