Before embarking on my research, I was kindly invited by Harrie Liveart to join a lecture on civet cats and have a cup of coffee (the non-civet kind) at Gallery Forum Box in Helsinki. We had met previously in May 2022 with H. Liveart to talk about our shared interest during their solo exhibition at Gallery Forum Box in Helsinki.
The lecture was given by Anthrozoologist Jes Hooper (University of Exeter, UK). Hooper’s PhD research concerns culture, economy and politics within human-civet interactions. Hooper and Harrie Liveart have collaborated on the topic of civet coffee and the result is one of the major bodies of work presented in Harrie Livearts solo exhibition (Forum Box, May 6—25, 2022) at the so-called Human Coffee Room. Civet coffee is a coffee type produced through the digestive tract of civets, often referred to as the world’s most exclusive coffee product, but is also bears major ethical dilemmas.
Hooper and Harrie Liveart’s Meri Linna and Saija Kassinen have also published, with Dr Jonathan Salvage (University of Brighton), a scientific paper on the collaboration. The paper is open access and available online:
Jes Hooper, Meri Linna, Saija Kassinen & Jonathan Salvage. “Technologies, Bodies and Faecal Matters: Embodied Empathy with Coffee Producing Civets.” Transpositiones Vol 1., No 2 (2022). https://doi.org/10.14220/trns.2022.1.2.73
More on Jes Hooper’s Civet Project on the project webpage.
More on Harrie Liveart’s exhibition on Forum Box wepage (in Finnish).
Photo by Anastasiia Chepinska on Unsplash