• 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 public. A cafe would give exhibition visitors something to chew on to accompany the art, such as sustenance and conviviality; enriched space for contemplation, information and reading. Elongate visit.

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

Conceptual

  Demonstrate an alternate economy and ecology.
  Promote free processes and experiences other than those governed by hegemonic global 
  capitalism. So many shops deal with just money. 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.

feral_trade_economy

Financial

Profit is not a motive for the cafe, which opens up the territory 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. 

• hours 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 (Furtherfiled 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 be expected to 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, included in 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, a partnership and tax entity, deals with rent and overheads, PAYE etc. HTTP is a http://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)

 Selection will involve a biodiversity of criteria, none of which should be 
 primary or exclusionary. Stock considerations include:

1. compliance with or skirting the regulatory perimeters uk_premises_regulations
2. shelf life / perishability
3. the facility of the food item to host information
4. information on source: relations with land embodied by the transport of its produce
5. information on carriage: network relations, trade relations of delivery, embodied by courier.
6. seasonality, including microclimates
7. locality

 Expand understanding of localness beyond the territorially bounded, inland model of 
 the village, to a shared set of connections with known transit routes, 
 like the scale-free hubs of the internet. 

common_products

 The commodity (as object produced for sale on the market) conceals its relationships 
 except for the money relation; conversely the product of the commons is filled with 
 human relations, although including possibly unpleasant ones: Peter Linebaugh.

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

tea_from_bangladesh

  As opposed to the now common iconic picture of producer, which overriders other 
  relations

http://feraltrade.org/fair fair trade iconography for example reversing earlier radical trajectory of visualising agriculture labour - in the case of gleaning - as a statement on rural poverty as opposed to example of pastoral virtue, enacted by François Millet back in 1857

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~waste/timeline/story-pic1.html

breakdown_of_expenses: menu to also include itemisations in the transit of cash involved in the goods' procurement, particularly its obstacles, as the materiality of money in small quantities generally defies the idea of the smooth movement of finance across global networks.

 Feral Trade opens up food-labelling as a platform for discussion and adaptation, as VS 
 righteous boasting and promotion of purity fetishes. 
 Undercut profit-motivated product constructions of elevated origins and destinies, 
 the type of truth claim propagated by fresh 'n' wild.

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

 Economy of miniaturisation / small-scale. Enables hosting small batches/single items
 ultra short seasons.
 Menu should be easily adaptable and transmissable, perhaps database-driven, 
 and include a section for items not in stock eg. 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. Documenting these journeys and
 relationships expands attention on food provenance beyond a gourmet-style fetishisation 
 of origin or source, to a broader ecology of supply. 
 Promote inter-organisational trade with artistic peers, local and foreign.               

 Challenge fresh+wild to a duel.

 Source producers or recipes from HTTP social networks   
 including city farm and allotment, home cultivation (cake, jams, herbs, sprouts) . 
 Commission or collect artists' food projects. 

 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 demo for mid-september ( jeremey bailey show)
 possibly a harvest party / launch in oct?

 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