Double A Projects

Founded in 2007, Double A Projects is a collaborative effort of artists Athena Robles and Anna Stein. The artists have backgrounds in sculpture, printmaking, drawing, design, and installation and have presented their work in galleries, museums, storefronts, and markets. Together, they make public interactive projects that explore concepts of generosity, exchange, and audience engagement, employing ‘social experiment’ strategies that act as tools for community building.

Global Free Store (2009–) is a non-commercial pop-up shop where visitors can give or get useful things like clothes, books, and household items. The project also invites curatorial and performative participation, with the artists hand-crafting items to pay contributors to the free-store economy. Situated in capitalist economic centers, the iterative intervention launched in 2009 in New York on Nassau Street, in Manhattan’s Financial District, posing the question, ‘What happens when you remove money from the equation in the financial capital of the world?’ Over the course of two months, more than 2,000 visitors came through the store. The space became a hub for locals and tourists alike, who shopped and discussed ideas around consumption, value, mutual exchange, resource sharing, and gifting economies.

When the project was initiated, the United States was just beginning to emerge from the great recession of 2007–09, which saw the U.S. housing bubble burst and a global economic crisis ensue. Describing Free Store, Robles and Stein say, ‘Alternative and generous systems such as bartering have long been used in times of financial hardship. Artists, in particular, are familiar with having to be creative to make ends meet and have functioned on generous systems, especially artist-to-artist. Global Free Store aims to broaden this circle of trust and exchange by including the general public.’ Indeed, as Ed Pilkington notes in The Guardian (March 15, 2009), Robles and Stein’s Free Store finds parallels in the free stores of 1967 San Francisco and New York set up by the alternative-lifestyle group the Diggers, who modelled themselves after the seventeenth-century English agrarian-reclamation group of the same name. The San Francisco Diggers clothed and fed returning Vietnam veterans, and even set up free hospitals for those who did not have insurance.

For HT22, Global Free Store is situated at the Royal Hawaiian Center, one of Hawaiʻi’s largest outdoor shopping malls in the heart of Honolulu’s tourist mecca, Waikīkī. The free store serves locals and tourists alike, featuring useful everyday objects, as well as unique artist-made items. Visitors are invited to participate in this non-commercial method of exchange by ʻpurchasing’ items free of charge or by donating items.