Kate Rich

Kate Rich is a trade artist and feral economist, born in Australia. From 2003-2023 she ran Feral Trade, a long-range economic experiment using the spare carrying capacity of the art world to transport coffee, olive oil and other goods internationally. Kate has worked as bar manager, usher, director and banker at Bristol's all-volunteer run Cube Microplex, system administrator for the Irational.org art server collective, member of the Community Economies Institute, and feral economist in residence with the Sail Cargo Alliance, an assembly of traders, brokers and ship owners looking to revive the ancient art of running cargo on wind-propelled ships. In 2020, she established the programme of the Feral MBA, a radically different kind of training course in business for artists and others. Her work within FoAM is concentrated in the emergent research entity of the Institute of Experiments with Business (Ibex). As part of that research, she has taken up a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024-7), at the Alpine Community Economies Lab (ACELab), research arm of eco-social design agency Brave New Alps (Italy). Her ongoing preoccupation is to move deeper into the infrastructure of trade, administration, organisation and economy. http://bureauit.org/data/krcv