Su Tomesen elevates street sales to art, and that hurts

A loud sound is heard in Bureau Europa, the institute for architecture and design in Maastricht. Su Tomesen (52) is converting this space into Toko Su: a sales exhibition in which she brings together stalls, shops and merchandise from different parts of the world. The artist and cultural historian spent a long time in Amman, Belgrade, Johannesburg, Naples, Medellín, Tirana and Yogyakarta as artist in residence. Trip after trip, her eye fell on the inventiveness and creativity of street vendors who set up and dismantle their ostentatious and colorful stalls every day. ‘They are art installations from the street’, she says herself.

Tomesen followed a number of sellers with her camera. In four films she shows that street sales in large parts of the world determine the street scene. ‘It is a way of being self-reliant in a world where economic inequality is increasing.’ The film is in Maastricht calle (Spanish for street), in which vendors choose every detail of their stalls with attention, care and sense of aesthetics. For example, Doris Sanchez from Medellín builds turrets of plastic brooms every morning along a busy street. Three brooms in different colors keep each other in perfect balance. There is indeed something artistic about this composition.

‘But sellers like Doris Sanchez don’t build the installations to make ‘art’, Tomesen says, ‘but out of economic necessity: it is important for street sellers to have a permanent place, so that they can be easily found by their customers. In the absence of a legal, permanent location, street vendors appropriate the public space. If someone asks for directions, they can just hear: ‘to the right past Sanchez’s brooms’. In this way, her stall becomes a beacon in the streets.

With the sales exhibition Toko Su, Tomesen mainly wants to raise questions. She wants to make the visitor think about the forced ingenuity of street vendors. Unlike street vendors who sell merchandise out of necessity within an informal economy, Tomesen has been invited by Bureau Europa to exhibit and sell her installations. She can therefore sell her work within a formal economy. ‘So I also have to think about price tags, just like in a store.’

The resilience and ingenuity of the street vendors Tomesen followed for her films inspire her own installations. In front of Toko Su built them Plastic Age: three high towers of plastic buckets, stools, trays and baskets. ‘The installation is both a critique of the excessive use of plastic and an ode to the colorful household products sold around the world,’ says Tomesen. To build the towers of Plastic Age she uses a bit of duct tape here and there, just like street vendors often do.

In the corner of the room in Bureau Europa, she places a stack of buckets lined with medicine strips on a pedestal. The work is inspired by a mobile pharmacy she saw in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince: ‘Street vendors carry pharmacies on their arms to sell medicines.’ By placing the installation on a plinth with a photo of the mobile pharmacy in Haiti, Tomesen asks for recognition and appreciation for people who are forced to deal creatively with their environment.

Tomesen considers herself an ‘ambassador’ of the people on whose work she builds. Yet it also hurts. She does for aesthetic reasons what others do out of necessity. It elevates something to art that is not intended to be a work of art. Do its colorful stalls hide a dark history and great inequality or do they offer a stage for stories that we don’t hear enough here?

She thinks she handles these unequal relationships well. ‘Despite the differences in privilege, I look for similarities and commonality with the people who cross my path.’ Meetings regularly lead to friendships and collaborations, not only in Yogyakarta where she partly lives, but also in the many other places she visited. ‘I want to build a stage for stories that often don’t resonate in Western countries.’