Topics: add things being different farmer handling Honesty Box Honesty Stall Internationaler Dorfladen name overkill proposal rural girl something Sufelje Village Kiosk village shop
Wapke and I collect each other’s best quotes. Normally Wapke wins with sentences like:
“ People think that if you’re from a big place you have big ideas, and if you’re coming from a small place, that your ideas can’t be big. That’s of course wrong.”
The thing I said during our week in Grizedale which scored for our list was:
“ The ambition ends once the story is finished.”
I had some of ours and other's projects in mind when saying this. Thinking of how many projects are prototypes and could be extended, but often finish their production once they're delivered.
They extend and survive as narratives and linked into networks, but are rarely continued as such. The term ambition refers to innovation in terms of "post-production".
I was thinking about how Grizedale initiates, produces and documents projects. In terms of production they also seem to come to an end once the project is published/presented/performed. And I think it’s worth thinking about the outcomes and how they could remain an active tool within the Grizedale network, rather than becoming just documentation or illustration of something that has been.
I’m mainly thinking of the range of produce that came out of the Seven Samurai residency in Japan, and the Grizedale programme and stalls at the A Foundation in Liverpool. How does the project and what has been produced remain exchangeable and relational within the network? How could the produce allow for an cross networking exchange, like a market, without necessarily interpersonal links.
When we did the Park Products project (www.publicworksgroup.net/pages/Park_Products_01.html) we tried to base the principle of the project on the idea of an informal economy, and trade as social space, utilising products as a tool to represent but also to initiate new social and cultural contacts and space.
Grizedale generates social/cultural space and numerous outcomes, and I think that Grizedale’s production can also be speculated as growing cultural space based on the exchange of “goods”. These goods can be anything, but need to be seen and established as a means to extend the spaces of cultural production and the networks linked them.
In a recent presentation by Jaime Stapleton (at one of Gavin Wade’s and Celine Condorelli’s Support Structure events) he talked about products as collective property and public goods. And I think many of the Grizedale “products” come out of collective and public production and are much more than individual commodities once the production process is over.
I’m phantasising about a powerful global rural economy, which exists outside of monetary market forces, and where goods are exchanged in order to make links rather than gather profit.
The idea of post-production.
What are those items?
Autonomous, in the sense that they're active, not just documentation and representation.
They "speak for themselves” and can be traded.
Have the qualities of a product which communicates itself.
Topics :
myvillages.org is currently using this blog to describe and refine first Grizedale impressions following their residency in March 2007, and to continue their conversations with Grizedale Arts.
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