Myvillages, Kathrin Bohm, Miranda Pope (eds.), with textcontribtions by Kathrin Bohm, David Boyle, Céline Condorelli, Seb Emina, Gilda O'Neill, Doina Petrescu and Constantin Petcou, Miranda Pope, Marijke Steedman
978-94-90322-56-4
Niels Schrader, Mind Design
240
15.5 x 22 cm
Softcover
English
For more information:
439 grms
Release date: October 2015. Book launch during Frieze London, and Frankfurt Book Fair.
Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks is the winner of the 2014 Create Art Award by Create London and supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham supports the project since 2014.
Myvillages is a pan-national artist group founded in 2003 by Kathrin Böhm, Wapke Feenstra, and Antje Schiffers. Its work addresses the evolving relationship between the rural and the urban, looking at different forms of production, pre-conceptions and power relationships.
Current and recent projects include International Village Show (2014 – 16) for the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Germany, Forms of Lending Shapes, A-Z Marzona Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Umeå Pantry for Bildmuseet Umeå, Sweden and Farmers and Ranchers with M12, Colorado, USA and Fries Museum, the Netherlands.
Myvillages works on a number of long-term projects with a focus on the particular local, but all projects develop trans-local connections within pan cultural and pan national networks, for example in projects such as I like being a farmer and want to stay one, the Bibliobox and the International Village Shop, all started around 2005 and ongoing.
One of London's well-remembered but fairly unknown histories is that between the early 1800s to the 1950s up to 250,000 working-class Londoners – mainly women and children – would leave the East End to spend the late summer weeks in the Kent countryside to 'go picking', creating a unique urban-rural relationship and lived culture.
Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks is a long-term art project by Myvillages to revisit the 'picking days' while at the same time opening up a full circle of fruit harvest, beverage production and drinks trade as a collective endeavour.
Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks looks at the complex social currency, histories and politics of access to the countryside, food production, everyday culture and current interest in commoning. These ideas are explored by navigating relationships between rural processes, urban communities and local land use in order to establish a new kind of company.
In its proposition, Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks is reminding us that rural and urban conditions are inherently connected in multiple ways, and the book follows the productive and reproductive cycles of the project in order to describe and expand on the different anticipated and practiced meanings of the project's four word title.
About the editors
Kathrin Böhm is a founding member of Myvillages and the London-based art and architecture group Public Works, whose participatory and collaborative public realm and design works include Park Products for Serpentine Galleries, London and 1000 bags here and now for Whitechapel Gallery, London. Böhm has recently curated Trade Show, together with Gavin Wade, for Eastside Projects in Birmingham and RUrban in Paris and is a co-organiser of the trans-local Eco Nomadic School network. Böhm is running monthly Haystacks in London, a series of informal events about rural realities and links.
Miranda Pope is a writer, curator and researcher in the department of Art at Goldsmiths. She is developing a notion of the ecological that is understood as an on-going process of thinking and doing that exposes and questions interests of all entities within assemblages, along with the intertwined politics of doing this, and exploring the possibilities for new curatorial forms to emerge out of it.
