Feral Trade Café

Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present Kate Rich and her project Feral Trade Café to Manchester. Feral Trade is a grocery import-export business, trading food and drink sourced through a range of social networks. For 6 weeks, the Feral Trade Café at Castlefield Gallery will serve up an array of ‘ferally’ traded drinks and snacks along with delivery documentation collected by the artist.

The term ‘feral’ describes a process that is wilfully wild (as in pigeon) as opposed to romantically or nature-wild (wolf). Feral Trade concentrates on small-scale releases of migrant groceries, sourced direct from their suppliers and circulated in the excess baggage space of existing journeys, primarily using other artists, curators, friends and relations as mules. Feral Trade proposes that this underground freight network is at least as reliable as DHL.

Coinciding with Feral Trade Café, Castlefield Gallery will host Summer House, multiple staggered projects/exhibitions for artists groups based within a 100 mile radius of Manchester. The main gallery will become a quasi ‘2nd home’ / ‘urban retreat’ / public exhibition space to test collaborative or curatorial methods. Further information to be released on individual artist groups and events soon.

More on the artist:

Kate Rich (b. Australia) is an artist and trader. In the 1990s she moved to California to work with the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT), an international agency producing critical information products including economic and ecologic indices, event-triggered webcam networks, and animal operated emergency broadcast devices. The Bureau’s work has been exhibited in academic, scientific and museum contexts. Restless at the turn of the century, she headed further east to take up the post of Bar Manager at the Cube Microplex, Bristol UK where she launched Feral Trade, a public experiment trading goods over social networks since 2003. Feral Trade forges new ‘wild’ trade routes across hybrid territories of business, art and social interaction. She is currently moving deeper into the infrastructure of cultural economy, developing protocols to define and manage amenities of hospitality, catering, sports and survival in the cultural realm.