Free Feudal Barter
Christopher L G Hill

Free feudal barter store was an exploration of the processes and implications of redistribution, exchange, swapping, bartering and donation. Through the exchange and gifting of ideas, objects and commodities, this project realised the inherent freedom within arts relation to Capital, with a relation to anarchist ideas and feudal sensibilities. While engaging with modes of display common among second hand and opportunity shops, Hill’s store in Studio12 operated as both a gallery/studio and as a striation of fiscal and gift economies.

Typically Hill’s work negotiates ideas of freedom as mediated through the self, others and objects. He uses the language of objects to undulate between the objective and the subjective in both a concrete and emotional way. Hill’s work explores the ways that anarchist ideas are present within inter-personal relations materialising within free intellectual property, publications, performance, object dialogues, poetry, gestural interactions, hyper links and web interfaces. In his work, debris and words float on floors and pages like a temporal mist, multi-directional and multidisciplinary, operating as a lived politic and art, active and in flux. Hill’s gestures, sounds, dislocated words and objects form a language, which is left wide open to multiple readings and dialogues.