EXCHANGE VALUES

The imaginal work with the producers in the Caribbean was an intensive social sculpture process: working with each producer in an ‘imaginal-work’ exchange using the invisible materials of speech, discussion, images, perceptions and attitudes.

However, once all the physical elements of Exchange Values were installed, on days when there was no organised forum, it functioned like a more traditional form of ‘socially engaged art’. Although it enabled consumers to individually enter the ‘invisible lives’ of the producers, there was no group process.

Many organised group processes took place in the Exchange Values arena between 1996 and 2006. These often included farmers’ representatives and campaigning groups. Although they were successful they did not include the kind of ‘connective practice’ that enables everyone to participate and to experience their own creative agency.

A Social Sculpture-Connective Practice
In 2007 Exchange Values was redeveloped to include a connective practice as an integral part of the work. A new physical element – a five metre table – was added to facilitate the structured connective practice at the table.

We worked at the table throughout 2007 in Dornach, Switzerland, as part of the international Ursache Zukunft conference.  Here, with a number of co-workers -including Alex Arteaga, James Reed, Rosa van Wyk and Nicholas Stronczyk – we explored and developed ‘connective’ ways of working at the table.

Anke Lowenspung, with Alex Arteaga, James Reed, and Shelley Sacks, contributing to a forum with 60 participants, Ursache Zukunft Conference, Dornach 2007

Through the daily fora we developed understandings, practices and new language that became central in many University of the Trees/Social Sculpture Lab processes and in the Earth Forum, a mobile social sculpture practice which was developed for the COP Climate Summit / Climate Fluency Exchange in South Africa in 2011.

The structured process in Exchange Values at the table – even when there is not a specific theme – offers every participant the opportunity to understand their relationship to the global economy, to explore in what sense they are ‘an artist’, to consider what they ‘produce’, and what helps or hinders this. This process and the social sculpture / ‘connective aesthetics’ principles underlying it are detailed in the Exchange Values training handbook.

The new handbook will available to a wider public in autumn 2017.

Exchange Values – 11 years on, describes the shift from Exchange Values: Images of Invisible Lives -where the 10000 unnumbered skins were on the floor, to the 2007 version Exchange Values on the table.

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The forum table was designed in collaboration with the Schreinerei carpenters, Goetheanum, Switzerland.

‘A Banana is not an easy thing…’

The story of the project from 1996 to 2006
The 20 ‘sheets of skin’ suspended around the walls are made from dried, blackened banana skins from 20 boxes of Windward Island bananas. Each box of bananas has a ‘grower identification number’ stamped on it. Having used this number to trace the grower, 19 of the sheets of skin are linked to statements from the growers of the numbered boxes. In contrast to these identified sheets of skin thousands of unnumbered skins fill the central, forum space. This installation, EXCHANGE VALUES: Images of Invisible Lives is one phase of a social sculpture action that has involved numerous processes, stages and a great many people across several countries. It has also had a rather long gestation period.

I began drying banana skins around 1970, not for any specific purpose, but because I found it hard to throw them away. I would stand with a skin in my hand, wondering where it had come from, who had grown it, what the life of this person was like. Each skin still had so much life in it; it seemed a pity to throw it away. So I stretched strings across the wall of my room, where the skins could hang to dry. As they dried, blackening, twisting, stiffening, they began to speak through their silent forms.

When in 1973 I was due to leave for Germany, I had hundreds of dried, blackened banana skins, filling a small wooden trunk. A friend advised me to empty the trunk and make compost. But these skins held much more than their physical properties. These relics seemed to reflect the invisible producers of everything we need and use: producers who, though all working to satisfy the needs of another, are also locked into forms of trade and work that extract profits for a minority, exploit the world’s resources with little care for each other and the earth itself, and distort the relationship between producers and consumers in a way that ultimately benefits neither, except those ‘playing the market’.

So I took the trunk of dried banana skins with me and, not surprisingly, had enormous difficulties explaining myself at customs. This experience gave me a sense, though, of the kind of discussion the skins could provoke. It dawned on me that if I sat with my ‘banana trunk’ and ‘read’ these skins for others Ð not in quite the same way as my grandmother read the tea leaves in a cup, as this ‘story’ needed no clairvoyance – I could engage people in reflection and discussion about our world economy and the society in which we live.

On several occasions in different cities, I sat on a cloth, with the banana skins spread out, reading the picture of the world economy for passers-by. Although this led to many interesting discussions, this action of ‘reading the banana skins’ was overtaken by new actions and explorations, including my Free International University work in Germany and South Africa. Nevertheless, whenever I ate a banana I would still hang up the skin, although I had no particular reason for doing so.

When I came to the UK in 1990 I again brought the banana skins with me. Discussions about GATT ‘free trade’ agreements and the effect this would have on banana growers in regions like the Windward Islands were regularly in the news. After 20 years of keeping dried banana skins, but not intending to do anything more with them, I found myself possessed by an image of sheets of blackened banana skin, strung up around the walls of a gallery, like dark, uniform rectangles of minimalist art. On closer contact one might realize that these apparently seamless and silent forms -that echo the ways we have collected and pinned out not only butterflies, but also lives and cultures- were skins; the skins of people’s lives, and of an economic process, in which the interconnections between consumers and producers are manipulated and concealed.

With some idea of using the skins, collected over years, to stitch into sheets of skin, I began to experiment with ways of curing and preparing the skins for stitching. Then, in the supermarket one day, I noticed a ‘grower identification number’ on a box of Windward Island bananas. I wondered whom this number referred to. Could the grower of a specific box of bananas be traced? Would there be a way to get the skins back from consumers? And, if so, how would one know which box of bananas the skins had come from?

My questions led me, in early 1993, to contact Geest, the company that then still had control of Windward bananas; Mr. Cornibert, London representative of the Windward Island Banana Growers Association (which became the grower owned Windward Islands Banana Development & Exporting Company – WIBDECO); the Latin America Bureau; and a journalist, Polly Pattullo, who had done work on the Windward Islands. I was told it should be possible to trace the growers from the numbers stamped on the boxes and advised to focus on St. Lucia, this being the island with the most intensive banana production.

Next Page

Exchange Values has taken 3 main forms

1 /  Reading the World Economy in the Banana Skins (from 1970)

2 /  Exchange Values: Images of Invisible Lives (1996 – 2006)

3 /  Exchange Values – on the table (2007 – ongoing)

1 /  From 1970 – 1974

Reading the World Economy in the Banana Skins
The precursor to the first Exchange Values social sculpture in 1996 was begun in the early 1970s. One day, as I sat with a banana skin in my hand, I began to wonder who and where the person was who had produced and cared for the fruit I had just eaten. I kept the skin and hung it on a string. Soon other skins joined it. When I left South Africa to come to Germany to study with Joseph Beuys, the skins filled a small wooden suitcase that I took with me on the plane. An encounter with customs officials in Germany and my explanation that I used the skins to ‘read the world economy’ as my grandmother had read the tea-leaves at the bottom of the teacup – gave rise to this first work with the banana skins.

‘Reading the World Economy in the Banana Skins‘ took place twice in Lingen, a small German town near the Dutch border.

The suitcase full of dry, blackened banana skins, that had accompanied me from South Africa, became the basis for this work. On a mat on the pavement I laid out the skins. This was an echo of the way my grandmother had read the tea-leaves in a cup. When passersby asked me what this was all about I said that like people read tea-leaves, I read the world economy in the banana skins. This was 1974. I was trying to understand how to develop social sculpture processes, but wasn’t sure how. I knew it had something to do with some kind of in-depth engagement and opportunities for re-thinking. This much I had understood from Beuys.

Although some fascinating exchanges took place, they were not substantial. This ‘pavement action’ with the banana skins did not feel much different from the small performative actions and interventions I had already become disillusioned with in my work in South Africa from 1968 to 1972.

2 / 1996 – 2006

Exchange Values: Images of Invisible Lives
This was the first form of the social sculpture process that involved the producers themselves, their organisations, and consumers.

This phase of Exchange Values lasted for 10 years – from 1996 to 2006. See ‘The Story of the Project’ and IMAGES 1996-1998 and 1998-2006

3 / 2007 ongoing

Exchange Values: On the Table
This new phase of Exchange Values was begun in 2007 in Switzerland as part of the exhibition Social Sculpture Today and the conference ‘Ursache Zukunft’/ ‘The Cause lies in the Future’ – a statement by Joseph Beuys.

See ‘Exchange Values – 11 Years on’ for 2007 developments.

See IMAGES 2007-ongoing [coming soon]

Going Bananas at the Voegele Kulturzentrum, Zurich, 2011
In 2011 Exchange Values was a key work at the Voegele Kulturzentrum in Zurich for 4 months as part of an international exhibition on the banana and its political, social, and economic history. The social sculpture process developed at the table in 2007 was further developed in Zurich and used with many groups, networks and individual consumers.

De Hallen / Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, 2017 – 2018
Since September 2017, Exchange Values has been at the Frans Hals Museum/De Hallen in Haarlem, Netherlands.

New social sculpture processes have been designed that focus on ‘listening into’ the needs and longings of the consumers at the table and the invisible farmers who speak their needs and longings to invisible consumers.

Another focus of the work at De Hallen is on ‘the future of work’ and ‘the future of the human being’. This relates to the increasing development of robotics and the questions that surround this… from the role an Unconditional Basic Income could play in enabling meaningful engagement in one life, to the sidelining of the human being in the ‘4th industrial revolution’.

Exchange Values can now also be seen as an archive of an earlier form of work, and a significant place to discuss what kind of future we want and how we see the future of the human being.