Tagged: Museum of Contemporary Commodities
Follow your dreams [sorry] Barbies
This week’s Times Educational Supplement featured a Barbie movie-inspired post by the Royal Geographical Society’s Steve Brace. He set out 4 lesson ideas for young people who may have watched the film: on carbon footprints (CO2 emissions and recycling), geopolitics (the film’s controversial map), gendered spaces (its patriarchy storyline), and trade (mentioning our follow the things project). It’s a short article and Steve has shown really nicely what following Barbie dolls along their supply chains might look like.
This post is a follow-up, highlighting a couple of ideas / approaches that teachers may like to bring into their classrooms to encourage their students both to find out more and to find creative ways to think through and present what they find.
Sweatshop Barbie
In December 2013, a life-size ‘Sweatshop Barbie’ was unveiled in Paris.
Continue readingNew project goes public: Museum of Contemporary Commodities
This is the project that Ian founded with Exeter-based artist and PhD student Paula Crutchlow in 2013. It involves a whole host of collaborators now. It is going public this weekend in London’s Finsbury Park. And its website is now live. Please check out what it’s about and take part in person and/or online. Here’s what it’s about. Click the logo to get to the webpage.
The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is neither a building nor a permanent collection of stuff – it’s an invitation. To consider every shop, online store and warehouse full of stuff as if it were a museum, and all the things in it part of our collective future heritage.
Imagine yourself as this museum’s curator with the power to choose what is displayed and how. To trace and interpret the provenance and value of these things and how they arrived here. To consider the effects this stuff has on people and places close by or far away, and how and why it connects them.
What do we mean by things or stuff? Everything that you can buy in today’s society. The full range of contemporary commodities available to consume.
Please join us on our journey by browsing and adding to our collection, attending an event, becoming a researcher. We are currently curating connections between trade-place-data-values in Finsbury Park, London, and here online. Welcome to MoCC!
Wanted! Curious Shoppers and Local Traders (MoCC phase 2)
In January 2013, phase 1 of the ‘Museum of Contemporary Commodities’ (MoCC) art/social science project took place at the University of Exeter: a trade justice thinkering day. This month, phase 2 – in London’s Finsbury Park – began to take shape. Here’s what we’re doing and how you can get involved, as published on Furtherfield’s website.
Job Opportunity – MoCC Project Producer and Coordinator, Furtherfield, London
Initial contract 120 hours May – July 2015. £1,800 (VAT inclusive)
View details
Wanted! Curious Shoppers and Local Traders
Explore the rapidly changing economies of global capitalism, and help to create a radical new artwork in Finsbury Park.
In July 2015 the Museum of Contemporary Commodities will transform Furtherfield Gallery into an interactive shop-museum, filled with locally sold products that are ranked by different categories and preferences.
We are inviting Finsbury Park residents (and online participants) to join a team of volunteer researchers and art makers and get involved in the process through a series of walkshops, workshops and digital-arty-social events, running April-July in the park and online.
Share your experiences of shopping and trading, and help us create an engaging and entertaining experience with sensor technology, sound design, digital interactions and live action, that makes visible some of the complex relationships at play between data surveillance, trade justice, and global/local commodity culture.
How to get involved in Finsbury Park and online
the back office 