Culture Now: Myvillages & Company Drinks

Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks in an art project in the shape of a community drinks enterprise. Artist Kathrin Böhm (Myvillages) and writer Miranda Pope (both editors of the recently published Company: Movements Deals and Drinks book), together with contributors economist David Boyle, architect Doina Petrescu, journalist Seb Emina and Marijke Steedman, curator at Create, map out the projects ambitions, its status as an art work and the practical reclaiming of the term ‘company’

Initiated in 2014 by international artist group Myvillages, Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks links the history of East Londoners going fruit and hop-picking in Kent to the set-up of a new community drinks enterprise in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. Between the early 1800s and the 1950s, up to 250,000 East Enders—mainly women and children—would leave London every summer to go fruit and hop picking in Kent, a ‘working holiday’ in the countryside which offered some income, fresh air and temporary independence from the everyday drag. This unique urban-rural relationship and culture survives vividly in the memories of those who went, and is the starting point for Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks. Based in this outer borough, the project revisits the lived culture and shared history of the ‘picking days’ whilst extending the collective labour process further to complete a whole cycle of production, trade and reinvestment into a new kind of company.

Myvillages is an artist group founded in 2003 by Kathrin Böhm (UK/DE), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (DE). The work addresses the evolving relationship between the rural and the urban, looking at different forms of production, pre-conceptions and power relationships. Current and recent projects include Vorratskammer / Pantry at House of World Cultures in Berlin (2011), Good News from Nowhere at the Architecture Foundation London (2013), Forms of Lending  Shape, A–Z Marzona Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and International Village Show (2014–2016) for the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig.

Kathrin Böhm is a London-based artist with a long-standing interest in the collaborative making and extending of public spaces through methods of collective production, distribution and usage. Böhm is the leading artist on Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks.

Miranda Pope is a London-based writer, editor and curator. Her work focuses on relationships between experimental curatorial practices and notions of the ecological and she is currently completing a PhD in the Art Department at Goldsmiths College.

The project was commissioned by arts organisation Create and was selected as the winner of the 2014 Create Art Award. It is supported by the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. In 2015, the project registered as a Community Interest Company with the name Company Drinks.

The Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks book is the third book in an ongoing publication series with Jap Sam Books and designed by Mind Design.

The talk is followed by an informal get together at the Company Drinks bar in the ICA studio (until 4pm).