‘On the Table’ 2007 onwards

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.

………………………….

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

Invisible Lives 1996-2006

‘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

From banana skin to eco-social workspace: evolution from 1970

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.

 

Project Overview

Exchange Values is a social sculpture process and arena for exchange in collaboration with farmers from the Windward Islands and their organisations. It creates a ‘permanent conference’ about how we live our lives, our relationship to global trade and trade agreements. It also explores the connections between imagination and responsibility or lived experience, and our ‘ability-to-respond’.

20 stitched ‘sheets of skin’ from 20 randomly selected boxes of Windward Island bananas form the basis of the installation. Shelley Sacks traced each box of bananas back to its origin in the Caribbean and recorded the voices of the growers. These recordings accompany each sheet of skin.

Through the situation of the banana producers and the effects of ‘free trade’ in one particular region of the world, EXCHANGE VALUES emphasises the interconnections between producers and consumers in our complex global economy and our roles as ‘artists’ in re-envisioning our world.

Through the integration of the aesthetic and the political, an imaginative space is created in which we can engage with the re-shaping and transforming of our lives and our society, and explore ways to develop a more participatory and sustainable society. This expanded workspace where we work with the invisible materials available to us all, where the personal and social imagination moves and weaves, is a creative space accessible to all.

EXCHANGE VALUES ON THE TABLE
Exchange Values has always created arenas for dialogue and for ‘imaginative work’: in the Windward Islands with the farmers and their organisations since the early 1990s, and in all 12 venues where the Exchange Values installation was presented between 1996 and 2006.

These dialogues have brought together and engaged consumers, farmers, NGOs, activists, teachers, ecologists, artists and others from many disciplinary backgrounds in challenging reflections and imaginative exchanges.

In 2007 a new element was added to the original EXCHANGE VALUES: Images of Invisible Lives: a huge five meter round table.

Exchange Values: five meter round table, with 10000 unnumbered skins in table recess. 24 – 30 people can sit at the table.

‘EXCHANGE VALUES on the table’, as it is now known, is in many respects the same as the original project. But with one significant difference. A 5-meter round table – filled with thousands of skins from unknown producers – takes the place of the 10,000 unnumbered skins that were once laid out on the floor. A permanent space for dialogue and exchange is thus highlighted as an integral part of the social sculpture work. Every person who enters the space becomes a participant, whether or not a planned forum is in progress.

Research on EXCHANGE VALUES begun over 20 years ago. For over two decades it has brought together a whole spectrum of people: activists, farmers, economists, government ministers and officials, ecological campaigners, artists, psychotherapists, engineers, cultural geographers, writers and of course, consumers.

Many ‘social sculpture’ forums have taken place during the course of the project: whilst collecting the skins from members of the public over two weekends in the centre of Nottingham, where free bananas were given out in exchange for their skins; in the Windward Islands with growers and sustainable development activists, and in the social sculpture forums that take place alongside the physical installation in each venue.

The need for what Joseph Beuys described as the ‘permanent conference’ is emphasised. ‘Visitors’ quickly become aware that they are not visitors in the global economy. Each of us on the planet is engaged in complex relations with people and other life forms. Here, at the table and in the installation, we can begin to live into the questions and let the images and experiences work in us.

This experiential-reflective process is designed to mobilise us internally and enhance our ability-to-respond.

Read more about this

History

1972-1975

Reading the World Economy in the Banana Skins
The precursor to the first Exchange Values project in 1996 was begun in the early 1970s, when one day, with a banana skin in my hand, I began to wonder, who and where the person was who had produced the fruit I had just eaten. I kept the skin and hung it on a string. Soon other skins joined it. When I left to come to Germany to study with Joseph Beuys, the skins filled a small wooden suitcase that I decided to take on the plane.

‘Reading the World Economy in the Banana Skins‘ took place twice in a small German town.

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 in 1972.

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

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’ – which draws on a statement by Joseph Beuys. See ‘Exchange Values – 11 Years on’ for 2007 developments. See IMAGES 2007-ongoing [coming soon]

Blog…

Working at the Exchange Values table: Connective Practice toward an eco-social future and ‘the aesthetic dimension’ of project!

Poster for Exchange Values -Haarlem, 2017-18. Texts all Creative commons licence -Shelley Sacks 2017.

Poster for Exchange Values -Haarlem, 2017-18. Texts all Copyright: Shelley Sacks 2017.

Shelley Sacks

Shelley Sacks is an interdisciplinary artist and social sculpture practitioner who writes, teaches, performs and works across many disciplines to facilitate creative exchanges that empower people and lead to new ways of seeing and shaping our lives and the world around us.

Since 1970 she has worked between South Africa, Germany and, since 1990, in the UK, exploring new forms of art and their relationship to the struggle for a sustainable and democratic society.

Her work includes more than fifty live actions, site works, lecture-performances, transactions and social sculpture processes including Heat Generators, The Bakery Tapes and The Third Way Social Model (1978); Mound: Re-thinking the Paradigm of Dominion (1992) a 3-month long process in a city in England); Thought Banks for the Edinburgh Festival 1994 and 1995; Exchange Values -Images of Invisible Lives (1996 – 2006) and Exchange Values -On the Table 92007 ongoing); Landing Strip for Souls [2000 -2003] a lecture-action; Ort des Treffens, Hanover, Germany (2009-10 ongoing as Citizen’s Initiative) exploring the links between reflection and active citizenship; Frametalks (2011 ongoing) and the international network project, University of the Trees (2006 ongoing) which includes Field of Commitment, Agents of Change and Earth Forum (developed the the Climate Summit actions in South Africa, 2011).

Recent co-authored publications include Die rote Blume (2013) and ATLAS of the Poetic Continent: Pathways to Ecological Citizenship (2013). She lectures and runs social sculpture processes in many parts of the world. See other selected publications.

She has also been involved in grass roots cultural and political organisations; education for democracy programmes; facilitating cooperatives in the 1970s and 1980s in South Africa; and collaborating with Joseph Beuys for more than a decade in the Free International University.

Shelley Sacks is Professor in Social Sculpture and Interdisciplinary Practices at Oxford Brookes University, UK; Director of the Social Sculpture Research Unit, initiator of the Earth Forum process, Graduate supervisor, and programme leader of the Masters in Social Sculpture and Connective Practices.

Exchange Values: Eleven Years On – 2007

“Exchange Values first venue was in the UK in 1996, although this social sculpture project started way back: collecting banana skins, in the early seventies in South Africa, and then in a series of pavement actions in Germany in 1974: “Reading the World Economy” through the banana skins, for passersby….”

– Shelley Sacks

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Social Sculpture and Connective Aesthetics: Commodities and the DNA of capitalism

“They’re in your face. Banana skins. Dried. Cured. Blackened. Flattened. Sewn together in a panel. Stretched. Taut. On a frame. Right in your face. And it smells. It’s rich. Gorgeous. You can’t move too far away. Get too distanced. If you want to keep the headphones on. The ones that are attached to the little metal box below the panel and the frame. The one with the number on. E49034…”

– Ian Cook

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Beyond Sensationalism: Social Sculpture – An Expanded Concept of Art

“Shelley Sacks has added a new dimension to the visual arts in Britain, both through her own social sculpture projects, like Exchange Values, and, as Head of Art at Oxford Brookes University, in establishing the first ever centre for the research and study of ‘social sculpture’ – the Social Sculpture Research Unit. In this she has honoured the life and work of Joseph Beuys, which was focused on his concept of ‘social sculpture’ in its many and varied manifestations, and in which his roles as teacher and artist were also intertwined…”

– Prof. Richard Demarco OBE

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Exchange Values, a New Aesthetics and Multi-stakeholder Processes

“The challenge of living, surviving, thriving – indeed of sustaining life – within the world of globalisation is still very new to us. Globalisation can conjure up many different images – of rapid flows of “funny money”; of the unprecedented power of multinational organisations; of the accessibility of so many people to so many others through the internet; of the awesome statistics on the rich-poor divide; of the rapid spread of AIDS; of global warming; of the World Cup; of the planet seen from space; of despair; of hope. How do we make sense of these images, which are on a scale that is quite new to us? How do we make sense of the dislocation brought on by the newness of it all?…”

– John Colvin

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Bananas and Citizens

“Bananas are only one example of how, in the contemporary world, we are all unavoidably interconnected with the lives and landscapes of people and places around the globe. Globalisation means that wherever we are, our lives impact on far distant others. How do people get to have a say in what the shape of these global connections should be: in the sorts of connections that are established, and in their form and nature? How do we, as banana growers and as banana eaters, as producers and consumers, and as people, get to have a say in what these connections look like?…”

– Luke Deforges

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Beyond Banana Wars

“In the 1970s and 1980s, the banana trade came to symbolise the injustices facing both plantation workers and small producers in developing countries. The ‘banana republics’ (Guatemala, Honduras, Panama etc.) were still controlled by big companies who maintained absolute control over the trade and the lives of the weakest participants in it. This ‘green gold’ of the Caribbean that small producers were legally obliged to sell to one British company, at a price imposed by the company, resulted in ‘a licence to print money’ as a Del Monte executive declared in 1990. The new five big banana traders that together account for over 80% of the world banana trade are Chiquita (US based), Dole (US based), Fyffes (Ireland), Del Monte (US based) and Noboa (Ecuador)…”

– Banana Link 

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Fruitful Links

“Growing bananas and tourism provide St. Lucia’s wealth. But to look for any mutually enriching link between these two pivotal activities is to search in vain. Perhaps the only time the tourist will see bananas (except possibly on the way to and from the airport) is in a hotel fruit bowl. I was once told by a tour operator who specialises in the Caribbean that he could not recommend his clients go walking in the St. Lucian countryside in case they came across “farmers with machetes”. So the ghettoised tourist has to be “protected” from the banana farmers, from members of the host community going about their daily tasks. And when I learned that cruise ships calling at St. Lucia are sometimes supplied with bananas out of containers from Venezuela, the gap between producers and consumers seemed even more offensive and absurd…”

– Polly Pattullo

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Beyond Unfair Trade

“Small banana producers in the Caribbean are facing a very uncertain future as threats to their livelihood mount up in the form of international trade disputes and difficulties in the market place. Much of this is related to the nature of banana production in the Caribbean, the structure of international trading arrangements and to the marketing strategies of the giants who control the banana trade at the wholesale and retail level..”

– Renwick Rose

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