Tom Ottway is given food for thought as he experiences one of the highlights of VEO 2006, Valenica’s renowned annual mixed media art festival, Valencia Escena Obert.

As part of the VEO festival (7th-25th February), the UK theatre collective Stan’s Cafe presented their installation: Of All The People In All The World. I went along to Greenspace 1, just a stone’s throw from the port are where the America’s Cup will be taking place in 2007, to check it out.

Even though the premise for the exhibition was intriguing: a grain of rice for every person on the planet, I must confess to being a bit under whelmed by the publicity shots: a few abstract piles of rice. Then of course there was the dreaded word installation, so often a byword in art for all things frothy, vacuous and frankly pretentious.

I must also confess to my hear sinking as, having paid my 3 euros and been given a grain of rice to hold on to, I entered the massive space to see nothing more than various sheets of paper of different sizes with piles of rice on them. You couldn’t help thinking ‘is this it?’

Yet within a minute or two I was eating my words, hooked by this brilliantly simple concept: a pile of rice and a simple caption. The abstract piles and accompanying text spoke volumes, quite literally, functioning as a kind of visual audit on the state of the world.

They represented things as diverse as the number of people executed in China each year (a huge pile) to the amount of injuries incurred each year by people in the UK drinking or pouring tea (relatively tiny). Particularly powerful were piles stood side by side (more people being born than dying in the world each day; the enormous amounts of tourists visiting the island of Mallorca each year compared with the relatively small number of residents), compelling you the individual, brandishing your little grain of rice all the while, to make comparisons and connections.

At the end of the exhibition I spoke to one of the many members of Stan’s Cafe, Jake Oldershaw (also a solo artist, whose work is well worth a look www.jakeoldershaw.com), who explained to me how the comments and suggestions made by the visitors form the basis for new statistics and piles of rice, making this an ongoing and organic process. Oh, and in case you were wondering, yes, the rice does all get recycled as cattle feed and no, you don’t have to keep your grain of rice forever -you can do whatever you like with the grain of rice you were holding in your hand- most visitors add it to the pile that best represents them.

If Stan’s Cafe missed one opportunity, it was not using rice from Valencia, which would have been very apt in this former rice warehouse. However, all in all, this was a superb example of art for and about the average person on the street which takes the abstract and makes it powerfully representational.

Of All The People In All The World continues to tour the world. Catch it if you possibly can.
See www.stanscafe.co.uk for more information.