STATEMENT OF WORK

The work you see in these pictures is called The Donkey, the Salt, the Goat, the Honey, the Oil. It's  a project about longing. It brings together my some work I have been making that considers longing in relation to the utopian avant-garde as well as food ecology, the logic of fragmentation and acceleration, and global trade. This has been informed by conversations with farmers, youth, and old people in rural Ontario, Toronto, and the sub-Arctic. A sense that something is out of order seems to be central to what people are talking about. This sense that something is missing can be found in the projects of Guy Debord, Robert Fillou, Yoko Ono and more recently Hito Steyerl. It's a longing for a world where narrative is unstable and where meaning is made circular instead of linear.

Like much of my previous work, goat milking, drawing, installation, scale models, Abrahamic prayer, Georgian Chant, beekeeping, and political economy play important roles. 

Below is a possible scenario to help explain the development of the long-duration performance plan. It will consist of a series of commodity trades, logistics, brokerage, artworks, animal care, travel, and negotiation. It will be incremental. It might go something like this:

I acquire a trip of goats in England. I set off from England for Greece, then Egypt, followed by Lebanon, Georgia, Turkey and Slovenia before returning to Canada. After the business of arranging and transporting our trip of goats from England to Greece, we trade them for a load of raw honey. By and by we depart Greece with a container load of honey, bound for Egypt. After receiving our moorage assignment at Alexandria, we haggle for several days finally reaching a deal for the exchange of honey for salt. Once we have made a honey for salt swap, we arrange shipping through changeable waters toward Lebanon. Now in Beirut, we exchange the salt for olives. From Beirut we conduct ourselves through swarms of traffic toward the Bosphorus, passing through by barge and tug, continuing to the Black Sea port of Anaklia in Georgia. Sliding into a slip we start to negotiate a trade of olives for timber. We hurtle back toward Turkey with an impressive load of timber. We barter for a small flock of sheep. Our sheep are now bound by truck for Slovenia, where we trade for a load of tree nuts and peppercorns. From Trieste we transport the load of nuts and peppercorns back to Halifax, first by packhorse then by rail and finally by sea.