• Motives for opening a cafe as an art project.

Practical

1. HTTP is located in the back of beyond - a business park in the residential London borough of Harringay http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harringay - from the point of view of its visitors. A cafe would give exhibition goers something more to chew on such as sustenance and conviviality; enriched space for contemplation, information and reading. Elongate visit.

2. A service for local residents and studio occupants. The neighbourhood is changing, it's is a way of connecting with the local community that's more fluid and open, a softer and more everyday interface than the gallery.

Conceptual

  Demonstrate an alternate economy and ecology: so many shops deal with just money.
  Promote free processes and experiences other than those governed by hegemonic global 
  capitalism. Feral Trade is an economy based on other peoples' activities and how you
  get from A to B. Even at this small scale it has a polemic value.

Financial

feral_trade_economy Profit is not a motive, which opens up the terms of engagement considerably.

• income scenario

All transactions logged and accounted for. The cafe would be designed as financially self sufficient, although seed funding agreed as probable.

 Feral Trade runs at a fabulous loss, in business terms.
 It operates in an absence of the principle of least effort,
 excluding it from basic capitalist forms of success. 
 The investment is in the network. 

• hrs of operation, visitor patterns, winter plan

Gallery hours are currently 12-5PM Fri-Sun, possibly extending to Thurs. Current average 15-20 visitors per weekend, mainly arriving via Manor House tube. There is no cafe between the tube and HTTP although it is possible to take a detour to Costa Coffee, a commercial chain in the business mall on Green Lanes. (Portuguese cafe in the other direction has cheap and good espresso and a largely Portuguese clientele).

The cafe would not necessarily be linked to shows. The gallery has an exhibit approximately 3/4 of the year. There are gaps between shows. In winter and gaps, the distributed library http://www.http.uk.net/docs/exhib6/summer_of_folk.shtml and Feral Trade cafe could occupy the gallery space. People would visit for the library, or for meetings. Library visitor numbers are low but it's the intensity of the experience that counts.

  
  It would be a coup to overcome geography and keep the cafe open in winter.
  Without affecting global warming. 
  Patio bonfires are worth looking into.

• caretaking: human resources as they currently stand

When the gallery is open, there is someone always available to respond to visitors. Saturday and Sunday have dedicated invigilation, Fridays can be more hectic. Currently Ale (administration and coordination) does Fri-Sat; Sunday there is a paid invigilator.

Hazards: At what scale would the cafe interfere with the basic running of other office activity?

• roles for cafe.

Service: preparation, waiting, cash-taking. Cafe service role would be rotated amongst present core personnel. This kind of distributed culture is integral to the way Furtherfield works as a group. http://www.furtherfield.org/about.php Cafe service should be continuous with / accessory to natural office life and disinvest food service of any lowered status. Instead advance tea and coffee service as a communications medium or active interpretation of aristotlean ideas of householding, which can be defined as production for use as opposed to production for gain.

Management: Feral Trade would remain involved in the politics and practicalities of supply. Weekly stock management would be 1 person's responsibility, probably Ale who deals with this kind of thing anyway.

• physical setup: service and storage spaces, equipment investment, utensil choices

Initial investment would be an advantage (equipment, utensils, presentation media). Stock would cover itself.

Decking that runs along the side of HTTP building would be prime seating area. Sound the landlord out on this between rent payments. Landlord relations are distantly friendly. There is a janitor who keeps a close eye on the compound. If landlord rejects decking plans, the parking spaces in front are formally HTTP's, paid for within rent. Cafe could serve from here with guests seating themselves informally. Is the back garden an alt possibility?

  Liability would need to be thought through or ignored.

• publicity

Cafe would have its own publicity strand as a HTTP project. Also promoted as background for exhibitions.

• operating models (positive and negative)

  Cafe Kino [[http://www.cafe-kino.com/about/index.htm]], Bristol. 
  Run by a collective of artists etc who also run the Here Shop/Gallery over the road.
  High proportion of customers are from their extended social networks & probably live 
  within a few blocks. People go there for the sociability, decor, wifi, 
  good products, cultural contagion plus pleasure of investing in own social 
  networks. 

  Leila's Shop, Shoreditch. Review covers the for & againsts pretty effectively:
  http://londonreviewofbreakfasts.blogspot.com/2008/04/leilas-shop-shoreditch.html

  Use existing [[uk_premises_regulations]] as a template/ jelly mould for evasion or     
  compliance. Produce a Regulatory reading menu as research project. 

• Current conditions

Umbrella company is Catlow & Garrett (partnership). Tax entity, deals with rent and overheads, PAYE etc. HTTP is a furtherfield.org project. HTTP & Furtherfield are not for profits with written constitutions. Furtherfield has an advisory board and is funded by Arts Council England. HTTP is located in a business arena zoned as mixed / live-work.

• Curatorial guidelines

 Coincide with HTTP core curatorial principles
 Promote Feral Trade experimental trader aims.

 Food goods will be informationalised (onboard or on menu)

 Stock considerations include: regulatory perimeters, shelf life (perishability), 
 network relations, the facility of the food item to host information.
 Selection will involve a biodiversity of criteria, none of which should be primary or exclusionary.
 These include seasonality, locality, information on source, information on carriage,
 trade relations with source, trade relations of delivery (embodied by courier).

Expand conception of localness beyond the territorial village model

 to a shared set of connections plus swift transit routes 
 like the scale-free hubs of the internet. 

 Ingredients and products with questionable ethics can be included, along with their 
 source information. The priority is to expanding the product monologue to articulate a 
 larger picture of the world it moves through.

common_products

 The commodity conceals its relations except for the money one;
 the product of the commons is filled with human relations, although including 
 possibly unpleasant ones: Peter Linebaugh.) 

 Open up food-labelling as a platform for discussion and adaptation, as VS righteous 
 boasting and promotion of purity fetish. 
 Undercut profit-motivated product aryanism of fresh 'n' wild.

 Read-write menu. Open to intervention from random vendors eg. customers can contribute 
 via sell/trade/gifting stock.

 Economy of miniaturisation. Enables hosting small batches/single items: ultra seasonality.
 Menu should be easily adaptable and transmissable
 perhaps database-driven 
 and list items currently in negotiation or pending.

 Courier process. Use moving social networks including known and funded travel to HTTP 
 to deliver goods from afar, including store-bought ones. Journey and relationship 
 documented, expands attention to food provenance beyond gourmet-style fetishisation 
 of origin or source to the broader ecology of supply. 
 Promote inter-organisational trade with artistic peers, local and foreign.
 Balkan and baltic states are a good place to start.               

 Challenge fresh+wild to a duel.

 Commission or collect artists' food projects 

 Source producers or recipes from HTTP social networks (cake, jams, herbs, sprouts)   
 incl city farm and allotment, home cultivation. 

 Regulatory limits: Define and serve emergency food products; outer limits of biscuit.
 Cream tea variations. 

 Feral Trade staples start menu. 
-    Coffee from El Salvador
-    Tea from Bangladesh (TBC)
-    Cola from Bristol.
-    Salt from Gujarat

Other organisational contenders
-    Fo.am Brussels. Grappa, Latvian cured meats, computer chocolate biscuits.
-    Mejor Vida Corporation, Mexico City. Hot chocolate
-    Irational.org, Bristol. Food for Free apple mush 

 proposed start time mid-september ( for jeremey bailey show)

 local: table menu of contents / protocols / products; launch/event

 external: present at fo.am open sauces in brussels in november as part of public diet 
 disucssion