Mondays

Friday Night – Flea Market - Social Action - with Ken Ehrlich & Brandon LaBelle + Haidy Geismar -- 11.17.06

Friday Night – Flea Market - Social Action - with Ken Ehrlich & Brandon LaBelle + Haidy Geismar -- 11.17.06

Contents:
0. Call for participants
1. About this Friday
2. Some Context
3. Useful Links
4. About Ken, Brandon, & Haidy

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0. Call for participants

ACTIVE ECONOMY: FLEA MARKET

Everyone is asked to bring things they would like to exchange during this event. However, Ken and Brandon are still looking for specific people who would like to bring more than one or two objects and actually have a table of goods. They will give more details, but if you are interested, please contact directly at blabelle (at) earthlink.net

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1. About this Friday

When: Friday Nov. 17, 2006 at 8:00pm-10.00pm
Where: 16 Beaver Street 4th floor
Who: All are invited
What:: Flea Market, Social Action & Presentation

We would like to invite you this evening for what should be part book launch, part lecture, part social action and part flea market.

Initially Ken & Brandon contacted us to organize an event together - one possibility would be to have a launch for Surface Tension Supplement No. 1 a book the two edited. We decided to open up the evening to their imagination, here goes:

A group of the participants has been asked to prepare a table of objects, items, and goods, to be available for visitors to acquire. The tables have been organized according to different domestic spatial motifs or
structures, from ‘the kitchen’ or ‘the bedroom’ to ‘around the corner’ or ‘under the floorboards’.

The market and the acquisition of objects will be organized around a bartering or trading system: visitors can offer other objects, services, items, promises, etc., in exchange for other goods or items. In this way, it is our intention to develop the event around issues related to
‘informal economies’ and the notion of the circulation of private goods through recycling. The event is structured in this way to experiment with the structure and formation of an exchange.

Please bring an item or two with you to offer in exchange. Or, feel free to offer other forms of services or more intangible items, such as stories, promises, secrets, etc. The event will also include a
lecture/presentation on economic structures by Haidy Geismar, an
anthropologist from NYU.

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2. Some Context

Since 2003, e+l (Ken Ehrlich & Brandon LaBelle) have collaborated on a number of projects which explore structures and systems in cities and how these come to effect or define specific communities or cultures. These include, for example, mapping food distribution routes in Hull, U.K., examining the food recycling systems in Berlin, Germany and investigating 'unofficial' recycling economies in Curitiba, Brazil. In conjunction with the publication of Surface Tension Supplement No.1, we have organized this event to look at the structure of economic exchange.

Some general ideas that are related to the evening's experiment:
– Economies of scale
– Global capital and the poetics/politics of everyday objects
– Various historical and/or cultural models of the economic exchange (potlach? gift giving?)
– History of theories of value
– Mauss and notions of the Gift economy
– Domestic spaces and models of exchange
– Flea Markets as public space

Essentially, we're interested in positioning "theories" of the formation and structure of an exchange alongside of the "activities" that are forming exchanges and models of exchange – less as oppositional forces than as various aspects of a complex of cultural and social formations.

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3. Useful Links

For Ken & Brandon:
http://www.freewords.org/graeber.html
http://www.freecycle.org/
http://supervert.com/elibrary/georges_bataille
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/anthro/faculty/geismar.html
http://www.kenehrlich.net/
http://www.errantbodies.org

for Haidy:
http://www.vanuatuculture.org/documents/digital-arts/index.html

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4. About Ken, Brandon, & Haidy

Ken Ehrlich is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He has exhibited internationally in a variety of media, including video, sculpture and photography. His work interweaves architectural, technological and social themes to play with ideas of invention and circumvention; superstructure and infrastructure; consumption and waste; and site, place and location. He often collaborates with architects and other artists in site-specific and/or community-based projects to intervene in public spaces. His recent project, Sound/Stage, was exhibited at FA Projects in London. He is the co-editor of Surface Tension: Problematics of Site (2003) and Surface Tension Supplement No. 1 (2006). He currently teaches at The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and in the department of Art at U.C. Riverside.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer working with the specifics of location. Through his work with Errant Bodies Press he has co-edited the anthologies “Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear”, “Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language”, and “Surface Tension: Problematics of Site”. His installation work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals
internationally, including “Sound as Media”(2000) ICC Tokyo,
"Bitstreams"(2001) Whitney, “Pleasure of Language”(2002) Netherlands Media Institute, and “Undercover”(2003) Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde, and his writings have been included in various books and journals, including “Experimental Sound and Radio” (MIT) and “Soundspace: Architecture for Sound and Vision” (Birkhäuser). He presented a solo exhibition at Singuhr galerie in Berlin (2004), and an experimental composition for pirate drummers as part of Virtual Territories, Nantes (2005). His ongoing project to build a library of radio memories, “Phantom Radio”, was presented fall 2006 as part of Radio Revolten, Halle Germany. He is the author of “Background Noise” (Continuum 2006).

Haidy Geismar is an anthropologist and is currently Assistant
Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of Museum Studies at NYU. Her interests and research include: visual anthropology, Pacific anthropology, intellectual, cultural and indigenous property rights, economic
anthropology, cross-cultural theories of value and valuation, materiality, contemporary indigenous art, museum theory and criticism.

Recent Publications include:
"The Spitting Image of Race? A Review of 'Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self,'" Journal of Museum Ethnography (March 2005), forthcoming.
"Contemporary Traditions: Museum Collecting and Creativity in Vanuatu." In Karen Stevenson and Virginia Lee Webb (Eds.), Creative Arts in the Pacific, Bathurst: Crawford House, forthcoming.
"Reproduction, Creativity, Restriction: Material Culture and Copyright in Vanuatu," Journal of Social Archaeology, 5:1 (2005).
Introduction (with Heather Horst), Journal of Material Culture, 9:1 (2004), pp. 5-10.
"The Materiality of Contemporary Art in Vanuatu," Journal of Material Culture, 9:1 (2004), pp. 43-58.
"Fieldwork: A Review" (with Rebecca Empson), Cambridge Anthropology, 24:1 (2004), pp. 39-50.
"Negotiating Materiality: International and Local Museum Practices at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and National Museum" (with Prof. Chris Tilley), Oceania, 73:3 (2003), pp. 170-188.
Vanuatu Stael: Kastom and Creativity, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (2003).
"What's in a Price? An Ethnography of Tribal Art at Auction," Journal of Material Culture, 6:1 (March 2001), pp. 25-49. Reprinted in N.Thrift and A. Amin (Eds.), The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader, Oxford: Blackwell Press (2003).