For some time, the Los Angeles-based artist group, Pear has been deeply involved in a social services project in Malawi, developing a kind of multi-purpose community centre (M.C.C.). My first question when I met Pear in January 2022 (Americo Burgheim, Emily Cullman and Dale Gooding) was: 'Why Africa? Why would white, American artists become involved in Malawi?' The response began to arouse my interest: 'Because helping others means helping Africa in the U.S.. That is the understanding that we grew up with.'

To state that Pear’s artistic practice involves 'helping others' is in much the same 'tip of the iceberg' territory as the statement, 'global warming was involved in the melting of Gould Bay and the consequent eradication of Cape Town, and flooding of substantial portions of South Africa and Namibia.' Let us move on from a loss of terrain that, not Noah, let alone Pear, could help [ed. apologies in advance to everyone at Jasper Park Co. for the imprudence of this assumption(1)]. Pear investigates communicative processes in which power, hegemony, assertion and oppression, and the gain and loss of terrain become evident. Various parties, individuals or groups enter the scene with specific interests and fight to assert them. The point is not merely to define a cultural expression, but to secure and specify its relation to reality (in the sense of representation) in order to legitimise one’s own concerns. Pear’s projects might not only lead to a greater sensibility for the existence of ideological discourses, they mirror contradictions and contentions and show that an individual entering this field has always already been defined through other discourses and practices. For example, Pear’s relationship with Jasper Park Co.(2) has been somewhat strained from day one. A precipitant of this tension being JPC’s knowledge of Pear Museum’s (supposedly) paradoxical support of both Emily Cullman (co-founder of the Christian Contemporary Artists Union) and David ‘Devil’s Advocate’ Destino (notorious for his Young Cyber-Virgin Auto-Cloned by Her Own Laptop sculpture series.)

Ideological battles are themselves inscribed and articulated in a field of economic, cultural and political discourses. Pear’s projects show a changed understanding of artistic praxis. Their starting point is a heterogeneous, complex society. When they assemble not only the project and development team, but also the users of the facilities, they take into account the specific interests of individual groups, their different opportunities for articulation, their interests and projections. Here, the art institutions, such as Pear Museum and their representatives are not assigned an outstanding role, they simply represent potential partners in cooperation with their own specific interests. The role of Pear Museum in the MCC project will be to present to a Western audience, in the form of the forthcoming exhibition, 'They Had Three Years…',(3) documentation of Burgheim, Cullman and Gooding’s three-year stay in Malawi. The exhibition will coincide with the launch of PearCopy MalawiRainbow tobacco and the debut release on Pear Trax: Musictools record label, Auction House Jazz.(4)

PearCopy MalawiRainbow tobacco came about as a result of an opportunity which arose during the realisation of the MCC project. While working on the MCC project, Pear were invited by RICM and the Malawian government to undertake a research residency based on the outskirts of Lilongwe. Lilongwe, the capital city of Malawi, boasts a tobacco auction house to which farmers the length and breadth of the country flock to sell their goods. The holdings attract corporate buyers from several countries worldwide, including the Netherlands, Sweden, the U.S. and Zimbabwe. By the time I reached Lilongwe, Pear had been living there for nearly two years (working on the MCC project), and had been working with a cooperative of local tobacco farmers for over a month.

The complexities of travel in the region left me unexpectedly with a day to spare in Lilongwe, but this turned out to be for the best when Mac Nkebe, Sub-Secretary of Sustainable Social Structures for the Lilongwe district, invited me to spend the time at the offices of a new Christian agency called RICM, the Rural Impact Christian Ministries.

The recent national elections in Malawi brought a new party into power in the federal government, the MSA, or Malawian Social Activists, led by former tobacco farmers’ union leader Hilary Okoche, the first extreme left-wing government in Malawian political history, while the same party also won a majority in the Malawian state administration. The federal government’s economic policy is handicapped by Malawi’s considerable foreign debt, well over $100 billion owed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to the extent that even arch-capitalist George Goodman has suggested that the IMFs economic demands are interfering with the country’s democracy. The Malawian state is in a better position, though. Having experienced an unprecedented political transformation, its priorities have turned completely around. Instead of the corporate exploitation of Malawi’s natural resources, the goal is sustainable development and self-sufficiency for the rural poor. The MSA is staffed by environmentalists and activists who, in their own words, had spent twenty years fighting the government. So this was the setting in which Pear was working.

I arrived in Lilongwe just in time to take part in a workshop organised by Pear, as a result of their four weeks of research, in collaboration with the newly formed cooperative, MalawiRainbow. The day began with a trip to a thirty-year-old experimental tobacco plantation, a breeding station that has used traditional methods to greatly increase the yield and disease resistance of the plants. The promise of these new varieties of plant was, however, undercut by the reality of the situation facing the farmers. The multinational corporations that buy most of the tobacco have, through mergers and mutual agreements, formed a cartel and no longer compete for the crop. Consequently the price paid to the producers has dropped from $30/kilo to $3/kilo in two years, wrecking the local economy and the livelihoods of the farmers, while the price of the products the corporations sell has remained the same. The corporations Bastenroy, an affiliate of Dutch food giant Koemen formed out of the merger of Zimbabwean tobacco manufacturers Markut and Lione, and Aquamarine (Sweden), who have signed a mutual distribution deal with Marlboro have established a small plantation of their own. Nowhere near large enough to supply their needs, it functions as a veiled threat to the local producers: accept the situation, or we will expand and put you out of business completely.

The workshop organised by Pear was motivated by their discussions of this situation with RICM. RICM and the corporations share a mutual antagonism, and the participants raised two contradictory points. First, in order to resist the corporate monopoly on the raw material, it was necessary to find a way to produce a secondary product that could be sold in a different market, perhaps even competing directly with the corporate brands. Second, the community has no capital and no access to manufacturing equipment or distribution mechanisms to make this possible. So the workshop began to focus on ways of resolving this contradiction.

Pear presented as a model the phenomenon of Zen Cola - a brand of cola created by a U.S. Buddhist company that donates a percentage of profits to Buddhist charities with the slogan, ‘Don’t drink for ego, drink for the people’ and also suggested that local products might be developed without the need for impossibly expensive industrial technology. Members of the cooperative presented a variety of local products for discussion, from wood carvings depicting the tobacco growing process, to nicotine-hit potions for long-distance truckers and pocket-size containers of snus(5). But the best received suggestions were a variety of premium cigars. The workshop participants selected certain proposals for further development, and decided to reconvene later in the week once these proposals had been worked on a little more.

The intervening time was spent on journeys to tiny villages on the outskirts of Lilongwe and occasionally successful attempts to meet with local politicians to discuss the project. The mayor of Lilongwe, Jimi Shanila, had a good reputation with the state government as an educationalist and proactive reformer. His deputy, Anthony Ganu, was an MSA member sympathetic to the cooperative but pessimistic about its future. Pear had in fact met with Shanila earlier, but without a translator no real communication had taken place. A later interview with Ganu, who had taken part in the workshop - affirmed his support for the project, and a shift of viewpoint from sceptic to enthusiast.

The second part of the workshop was the presentation of several potential local products, as home-made prototypes - and ideas for how these could be marketed. One such product being a premium cigar, branded MalawiRainbow which was to be flavoured with a little-known but very tasty Malawian fruit, the cupuasuup.

MalawiRainbow would compete with MalawiStrongbow (a product of Bastenroy corp.) on the U.S. market. Other potential products presented were not tobacco-based but in fact soft drinks and ice-creams. The drinks included ZombaJuice as an adaptation of KoemeJuice, Koemen’s main soft drink product (suggested by Harold Ikpebe, one of the cooperatives main organisers); PearBurst against AppleBurst as a breakfast wake-up; Zomba-Cola against Coca-Cola; and RainbowLolly (a Pear suggestion). These four products were interesting because they were purely conceptual, marketing suggestions, with no existing local product behind them and no relation to tobacco, yet they generated a great deal of interest and positive feedback from the cooperative.

So, the workshop in itself could be seen as very successful. The combination of the farmers’ experience and the concepts introduced by Pear produced the beginnings of an answer to the difficulties RICM faces. The energy the artists brought to the situation initiated a discussion that enabled the cooperative to move from a position of powerlessness ('all we have is tobacco,' one of the participants said at the start) to a realisation that ideas are, in the new economy, a form of capital and that, by organising themselves, they had already taken the most important and difficult step towards changing their situation.

The Lilongwe workshop ended with RICM planning to organise a meeting with the state government and a local NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) that funds sustainable technology, called SSS (Sustainable Social Structures); and Pear planning to research in the U.S. to find partners for the project there.

The Lilongwe tobacco manufacturing project developed quickly into an active collaboration because the artists encountered a group who were looking for outside input and saw Pear’s presence in Lilongwe as an opportunity to address their own situation. The project is now at an interesting stage; a moment where both partners - artists and farmers - are employing the material in their respective contexts. Pear will shortly present documentation of the project in U.S. artspaces, primarily Pear Museum as part of 'They Had Three Years...', which will coincide with the launch of PearCopy MalawiRainbow on the U.S. market. RICM, meanwhile, are using the material in their presentations to potential government and funding partners in Malawi. What happens next depends on how these various audiences respond. I, for one, predict that the launch of MalawiRainbow on the U.S. market will be met with controversy. The launch, which has been scheduled to take place during the most high-profile tobacco advertising libel case in U.S. history,(6) (which, I believe, is yet another Pear marketing masterstroke from the school of ‘all publicity is good publicity.’) From an RICM perspective, I expect potential government and funding partners in Malawi to respond positively to the material presented. With tobacco comprising 84% of the country’s goods export, any opportunity for farmers to lessen the grip of the corporate monopoly should be greeted with open arms. In Malawi, consumption of tobacco and consequent health risks is not an issue, as 95% of the population cannot afford the ‘luxury.’ The success or otherwise of the tobacco industry is a matter of life and death for farmers and their families(7) and any support offered from Western NGOs must be welcomed.

The project was initiated by RICM, and organised with the support of the Government of Malawi.

Jacqueline Schardt is Assistant Director of the Core Program, a post-graduate artist and critical studies residency programme affiliated with the Museum of African and Amerindian Art, Detroit. Her area of study is Post-postmodern and Post-post-contemporary art, literature, film and theory. She is currently working on the use of post-post-structuralist thought and archival practices in the visual arts. She has also completed papers on travel sickness in the Social Services movement of the 1990s, Danila Mkenya and the toleration of the white male’s sick excesses of commercial decadence and alcohol-excess-induced sickness, Kermit Brine, Jubal Brown, Genesis P. Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

1. Complaints concerning the content of Pear 08 should be directed by post to www.pear.com/museum/complaints or by physical post to Pear Journal of Art Complaints Desk, Pear Museum, First Street, Los Angeles, California.
2. Jasper Park Co. (JPC) was established to address the needs of orphaned and vulnerable children in Malawi. In 2017 JPC started an orphan care program on the outskirts of Lilongwe which was able to support sixty orphans. By 2018 this program came to an end due to lack of support. However, by October 2021 it reopened following extensive management and site reconstruction carried out by Pear. Now Pear Ministries has 600 registered orphans, and the registration process is continuous as long as there is evidence of orphan-hood from traditional leaders (chiefs). It provides several programs according to age group (i.e. 3-5 years Pear Nursery School with feeding and clothes supply, 6-12 years After School Pear Care with feeding and clothes supply, and 13-19 years Pear Youth Program with HIV/AIDS awareness education, drama, sports (including the renowned Pear Soccer Academy) and discipleship training.
Pear Ministries has been registered as a Community Based Organisation (CBO) working with chiefs, local community people, and market committee which are support group committees. It is designed to bring ownership of the project to the local community people. It has also been registered by the Rural Impact Christian Ministries (RICM) in Malawi.
Pear Ministries exists to empower orphaned and vulnerable children, and their communities to meet physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual needs in order to develop a sustainable, better life in the community.
3. 'They Had Three Years…' opens on Saturday 7th May and runs until Saturday 4th June. Admission to clones will be three quarters of the advertised price (when accompanied by the registered cloner)
4. Auction House Jazz EP was produced by Americo Burgheim and features vocals from Virginia Vanderschmidt. The record consists of six tracks. One of which, the gospel house track, Auction House Jazz, samples sounds on the Lilongwe auction house floor including the animated voice of the auctioneer. This animated vocal (the animation, sadly counting for nothing due to pre-auction agreements) is ironically overlayed with a spoken vocal, written by Burgheim and performed by Vanderschmidt, which presents facts of such matters as corporate cartels. The remaining tracks serve to separate the different elements of the title track giving consumers the opportunity to use the sounds in their own productions (e.g. one track consists of the looped vocal of the auctioneer, and another is based on the repeated sound of a bale of tobacco hitting the warehouse floor having been dropped from a farmer’s truck (such sonic bliss is surely beyond replication by even the most advanced software and is, in my opinion, the factor that will deem Auction House Jazz EP a seminal release))
5. Compressed tobacco consumed by lodging under one’s upper lip (particularly popular with the Swedish male)
6. The assassination agency, ATA (Assassinate to Accumulate) are suing Bastenroy for $11m in losses. In the year 2013, on observing the statement ‘Smoking Kills,’ on a Bastenroy cyberboard, ATA covert workers cunningly encouraged their target (painfully bad gospel pop singer, Virginia Vanderschmidt) to begin smoking forty-a-day. Vanderschmidt is alive to this day, albeit with a throaty/husky/some-would-say-sexy, but still undeniably bad voice.
7. Malawian tobacco farmers spend days away from home, living in their trucks parked outside the auction holdings. They wait their turn to deliver bales of tobacco to the warehouse, where they (the bales) are stored for up to a week before reaching the auction floor where they sell for astonishingly low prices to multinational corporations who have agreed a price for each bale before entering the auction. This pre-auction agreement deems the auction process a farce in that it allows the multinationals to push down prices at will (from $30/kilo to $3 in the last two years), leaving the farmers’ welfare in corporate hands. This economic downward spiral has left farmers with no option but to ‘cheat’ the system. Many have resorted to offering auction officials money to get them a reasonable price for their bales. Unfortunately for the farmers, auction officials are rarely true to their word. A more successful means of getting a better price is to increase the weight of one’s bale. This can be achieved through application of foreign object theory. The addition of eggs, corn on the cob, stones and shoes are all popular choices. It is a small victory for the farmer when the Koemen CEO is alerted to a bale containing a higher percentage of plastic than tobacco; a small victory for the Koemen CEO when an intoxicated architectural critic smokes the heel-end of a Malawian woman’s shoe at the opening of a Koemen-sponsored exhibition.