Colonial Grocery Store
Colonial Grocery Store
Intervention in public space and its documentation, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2008
Kalle Hamm and Dzamil Kamamger have collected one product from every country in the world – as far as they were able to find them in Rotterdam. There are 195 countries that are with a general international acknowledgement. The version made this summer in Helsinki had 96 products. The Colonial Grocery Store asks the questions of accommodation, as well as underlines the logic of global economics and its desire for certain products, leaving others in the marginal as unwanted, outside the trade routes ordered by big corporations. Colonial Grocery Store seems to trace the footsteps of the colonisers, but in an altered form: the stores gather evidence of all those who have moved half the world away from home, but still want the food stuffs and other specialities as they "should be" or as they used to be back home.
Saara Hacklin