Dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism.

Take a class every night with a range of specialized teachers in exchange for basic items and services. Secure a spot in a Trade School class by meeting one of the teacher’s barter needs.
By Day: A Shop
Drop in to barter with artists, designers, and craftspeople on a range of products and services. Peruse the trading board for things you want, and leave a contact card for things you have to offer. Skilled staff will help you make connections.
By Night: A School
Take a class with a range of specialized teachers in exchange for basic items and services. Secure a spot in a Trade School class by meeting one of the teacher’s barter needs. For example, grant writer Caroline Woolard is looking for local produce from the farmers market. Agree to bring her a dozen crisp apples, and you’re in!
By Jove: A Great Idea
Trade School was conceived by OurGoods.org to encourage artists and designers to trade with one another. Grand Opening brings this concept to everyone with its convenient storefront location, media attention, and easy to use interactive website. Together they do away with the dollar and get the things people need to the people that want them without the restrictions of currency. Let the exchange begin!
Visit Trade School at 139 Norfolk in the Lower East Side of New York City from January 25th to March 1st. Register HERE.

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Our friends at the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination need your video skills.  Their forthcoming book/film, Paths Through Utopias, will be a brilliant speculative fiction, a look at the crisis folklores of tomorrow through the lens of today’s post-crash resistant spaces:

Whilst the book is a piece of travel writing about the experience the film is a documentary fiction in the form of a post crash road movie, shot in the places visited but set in the future. The book and the film are seen as a dialogue between present and future, fact and imagination.

Unfortunately, the Lab of ii’s film editor has fallen ill – too seriously ill to finish the project, and they’re in need of a new person to fill that role.  If you have the experience, especially if you have worked with feature-length films, know Final Cut Pro, are open to experimental and collective working environments, and share in the film’s vision, you might just be perfect for the job!

There’s a modest sum of money attached, £2000, to carry you through the July 2010 deadline.  If you’re not busy and are interested, drop us a line before the end of January and we’ll put you in touch with the right folks.

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“Why should we continue to be poor when it is possible to use the infinite imagination which is our HEAD and our HEARTS!” -Bertrand, France

Lori Nelson has been documenting recession-era stories in souvenir form, painting stories of foreclosure, shame, swindling, and failure on pine plaques.  Inspired by Studs Turkel, her project is a people’s history, a folkloric look at our habits and emotions during a crisis, with the aim of memorializing these intensely personal stories for ourselves and for future generations.

Thanks, Rayna!

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Oh my – check out the amazing publication, slick map and great website just launched by the always amazing Center for Urban Pedagogy: Envisioning Development. There you will find toolkits about urban development and affordable housing. Pictured here is a part of the Affordable Housing Toolkit, a portable workshop that housing advocates, policy experts, community boards, developers, and others can use to teach their constituents about land use and development in New York City. It’s the first in CUP’s series of Envisioning Development Toolkits on topics like affordable housing, zoning, and ULURP. Download the Affordable Housing Book (PDF)

The Center for Urban Pedagogy
CUP makes educational projects about places and how they change. Our projects bring together art and design professionals – artists, graphic designers, architects, urban planners – with community-based advocates and researchers – organizers, government officials, academics, service-providers and policymakers. These partners work with CUP staff to create projects ranging from high school curricula to educational exhibitions.

Center for Urban Pedagogy

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Richard Florida’s concept of the creative class, that mantra of capitalist urban planning and development, can be simplified into two stages: creatives move in to a neighborhood, bringing their bohemian trendiness along, and opportunistic developers swoop in to brand and capitalize upon the new, hip ‘hood.

To Florida and many, this is a good thing, but the recently juried I Want To Live Here film competition recognized the negative effects of this policy of gentrification and took it head-on.  The winner, above, conceived of the re-zoning and rent hikes that accompany so-called development schemes as a war on creativity, which drives artists to produce more client work, and consequently lower quality work.

Other entries are gradually being posted to their website, including the runner-up.

Thanks, Rayna!

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