Art From London Markets, a-n feature

Recently I have been working on a series where the narative is that of the origins of international trade of food stuffs, rather than the personal narative of market users.  Last summer we spent a fantastic afternoon walking though the streets of Cahors former spice quarter: The area  where the English traders would buy from the French, who in turn had bought from the Venetians, who before that had bought from the Phoenicians or other Middle Eastern traders who had procured spice from, according to their stories, the dangerous Phoenix and dragons  that guarded them fiercely somewhere at the other end of the Silk Road.

This was before Vasco da Gama, but it is the start of the story of international trade.  The silk route traders must have had plenty of time as they traveled along the great roads to make up their stories.  The stories of the Phoenix with sharp beak and long talons which could arise from the dead.  Of the dragons and monsters to the East who were busy protecting their hoards of magical spices so much in demand in Europe.  The wealth of this trade lives on in the buildings of the spice bazaar in Istanbul and the wealth displayed in the many buildings of Venice.

In Europe where a nutmeg was worth more than its weight in gold, and where that value was 7 well fattened oxen.   If you wanted to buy 7 well fattened cows today, and lets face it they are not such a  common currency these days, unless you happen to be a farmer or butcher, you would pay £868.(Farmers weekly current average price for cull cows described as well fleshed with even fat cover, the nearest I could get to a fattened ox.)…but you would not pay that for one nutmeg would you? It  makes an economic issue out of a hot cross bun.

These prices were the engine behind many wars in Europe and across the globe in the name of European powers,  wars, naval exploration and international shipping.  Spices were the oil of its day.  So this week I have been thinking about the history of International Trade and the role of spice in motivating various European powers in building shipping fleets and the perception of easy money to be made in creating economic crises.

The East End of London used to be the centre of the import trade in the south East.  Both the wealth and extremes of poverty associated with the British East India Company have their geographic origins here.  The history of London as a market is the history of the river.  There have been trading posts here since the earliest traces of settlement.  The legacy of this is the massive range of markets across this area, probably denser than the rest of London, and the range of people, probably more diverse and mixed than any other part of London.  The East End has also long been the artist quarter, which is why Bow Arts Artist Quarter is so well named, with a lower (although no longer low) cost of living, and old warehouses, factories and religious buildings used for studios.  This is shifting, the City creeps across the East End, with development projects which displace rather than carry people with them all built on the perception of easy money to be made.

Many people think of Bengali immigration as a new thing, however it has its roots in ship workers stepping ashore in Limehouse from the ships of the East India Company after the Mughal Emperor made an exclusive trade agreement with the EIC in 1634 that allowed the EIC the sole trader status in spice and sugar from the Bay of Bengal.  The Chinese population in Limehouse, London’s old China Town have a similar history.  Here is where trade and reputation are not always fair bed fellows, because why is it that in popular culture it is the Chinese who brought opium to the UK when in fact it was the British EIC that took Opium to China from India.  The British East India Company that had its own armies, that resisted control by state powers, and in many ways was the first UK based Transnational Corporation. If you have been watching “The Night Manager” think Richard Roper in period costume.

So this area has always been tied up with making massive sums of money, at the same time as having a concentration of poverty.

So there is this magical thing, the way that we tell stories, the way we project ourselves into the lives of others and the way that those stories reflect back at us.

There is the moment a baby recognises his or herself in the mirror, when the concept of self is establishing and the self becomes a recognisable entity.  There is the development of visual and oral language, and the stories we tell with these, unlimited by the boundaries of truth, but often containing an element of it any way, even perhaps when meant as a disguise.  And towards the end of life for some people these narratives fade and become entangled while the people themselves are still alive, to the point when the person in the mirror is a stranger in the room, a slow loss of self.  For most of us this loss of stories and of self comes with death.

Because we can dissemble, even to ourselves, then, over a life time we “remember” somethings that are retold family stories and maybe we weren’t even there, or we remember a true moment in a way that is resonant only to ourselves, or we remember a truth, perhaps a real truth, that it is difficult to share.  And these memories, they make up ourselves, as we shape them we shape our being and in a sense they are us.   And when we share them we make our culture, our subjective collective reality.

I have been putting together a proposal for a temporary “Food Church” installation, exploring the ideas of food as sin as expressed in contemporary food and pop culture, and of the way that stories can be influenced by cultural prompts.  I will be asking for Food Confessions as well as food stories.  Iam interested in the power of language so will use text  in the space inviting people to donate a story, to help themselves to food and to give a food confession.  A confession is after all another kind of story, just with a particular moral inflection.

Broken reflections

• artfromlondonmarkets.blogspot.com
• artfromlondonmarkets.com
• National Gallery
• pocketarts.com

Happily I find myself with an unexpected extra day to work on Tuesday 5th March.  Virtuously thinking I would take this day to the DIY that needs doing: fixing the boxing around the now fixed leaky pipes, I arrived at the timber merchants and found I had forgotten my measurements….. so I bought some off cuts instead and decided to make some work.

Making that decision  brought joy to my heart, the boxing can wait.   I  dedicated the whole day to making! Hurray.  A woman’s day present to myself.  The balance between the domestic work, care work  and artistsic work is a challenge even though I am no angel in the house.

Which in turn meant I could spend a good chunk of time  online making applications and registering for opportunities. So I have a place in the Kensington and Fulham Open Art Spaces once again, and am waiting to hear from the others.

So the freedom of the week with the extra work day allowed me time to think about ways of symbolising the ephemeral nature of story and how it offers us glimpses into ourselves:  The broken reflective surface of the gild symbolises the way our stories offer an incomplete and impartial version of ourselves at a personal level, and still the preciousness and frailty of those stories at a social level.   This piece is for Padma.

It also allowed me to mess about with colour, prime the boards I bought at the timber merchant and mess about with my daughters type writer experimenting with ways of combining text gild and paper, the type providing an indented surface.

I am currently playing with new ways to combine selected quotes from the stories collected so far with images.

With my hand nearly back to normal by the end of this week I have started making again, I have been looking at some very unseasonal raspberries. So with a treat for my daughters taste buds rather than an eye on the environmental impact and inspired by the burgeoning greens around me, now that spring is here, I have been playing with the pinks of the fruit against shades of fresh green, and playing with the scale of the green and pink areas. Which of course got me thinking about how we have become accustomed to getting whatever we want when we want, and how this has been going on and increasing for a long time. The roots of British importation of food from beyond Europe go back to Tudor times and share roots with the start of the Empire. This same root that transformed us over the twentieth century with the dissolution of the Empire into a more modern kind of international liberal society, which at its best made room for cultural diversity and at its worst discriminated along the lines of difference rooted in supremacist ideologies that were used to justify the notions of Empire in the first place. Interestingly a lot of the foods we think of as quintessentially British have their heart in this trade: Sweet Spice as imports in the late medieval and early to late renaissance periods were status symbols. This is why much of our celebratory traditional foods are spicy and contain dried fruit, mince pies, simnel cake, wedding cake, Christmas pudding……. These rich foods mark celebrations because the ingredients were sourced abroad and were expensive, so saved initially for the elite and then once they permeated the rest of society were for special occasions. The ease with which we have been able to import fresh rather than dried or preserved produce over large distances is relatively new, and increased and expanded dramatically in the 20th century with faster ships, better cooling technologies and with flight. And since the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s there has been an IMF drive for export led development in less developed countries, adding to the variety of that supply. The pattern of this development “encouraged” by the IMF was frequently agricultural products first especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where balancing the need for overall economic development and food security for the local population was not always straight forward. (See earlier posts covering this). So we have unseasonal products in our shops and street markets because of this trade, and trade with Europe and Asia. What we do need to be sure of is that the producers are getting a fair price, a price that improves their lives, and that the investments in agriculture go a long way to increasing local food security and do not exacerbate local food price rises, which would of course increase food insecurity for the people in the community not benefitting from the trade. The current focus of the UN ZeroHunger campaign (@zerohunger)is for agricultural development with food security and sustainability of the local people at its heart: It is a shift in emphasis in response to the late 20th century emphasis on export and its failures. And as it is early March and tomorrow is international Women’s day, it should be remembered that in Sub Saharan Africa and in fact if you take the globe as a whole, most of the worlds farm workers are women, and that this is especially true in countries with farming practices which are labour intensive. The best development models of course take those women with them, the worst leave them behind. Which green shall I use here?