Ken Ehrlich + Brandon LaBelle
"Active Economy: Flea Market"
a market of selected objects and actions
at 16 Beaver, New York, with a lecture on economy and gift-giving by Haidy Geismar
November, 2006

download Haidy's lecture here

Haidy Geismar is Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Museum Studies at New York University.
materialworldblog.com

In celebration of the release of Surface Tension Supplement No. 1, you are invited to join us for a Flea Market.

Each 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 occurred through a bartering or trading system: visitors offered other objects, services, items, promises, etc., in exchange for other goods or items. In this way, the event was developed around issues related to ‘informal economies’ and the notion of the circulation of private goods through recycling. The event was structured in this way to experiment with the formation of an exchange.

the library - formalism of covers / theory or fiction...
the kitchen - sponges and postcards: do the washing while generating postal exchanges
the bedroom - circles and O's (hairbands, sweatbands, etc) with photocopied texts on play, cinema, and feminism: give me a circle or an O and you can have a hairband and a text
the dungeon - secret idols...
around the corner - giving gifts of sound in real time...
the stoop - all the things that trace the movements of derelict culture
the closet - secrets in a box in exchange for your secret...
 
Thanks to JG Thirlwell, Kabir Carter, Estee Pierce, Tianna Kennedy, David Galbraith, Maria LaBelle, Anna and Jay, and Janet +, for their participation and creative verve. And to Rene Gabri and Ayreen for their support.