| art.relation.publishedIn | The work was published online and performed and presented at the PARSE seminar Fiction and Finance on 17th of September 2018, which included a performance reading by Erling Björgvinsson and Ida Börjel and presentations by Miriam Meissner on Specters of Finance and the Black Box City and by Leigh Claire La Berge on Abstraction in Fiction and in Artistic Labor. Parts of the work where presented as follows: Björgvinsson, Erling and Börjel, Ida. ”Cute Counter Narratives: Follow the Money.” Parse Dialogue on Fiction and Finance, Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, September 17, 2018. Erling Björgvinsson. City Fables/Follow the Money — Collaboration and Critique in Time of Financialization Capitalism. Lecture at Konstfack research week, 29 January 3 February, 2017. Ida Börjel och Erling Björgvinsson. Follow the Money – Collaboration and Critique in Post-Fordism. Vetenskapsrådets symposium för konstnärlig forskning, 30 November, 2016. Björgvinsson, Erling. Narrating Co-laboration and critique in post-Fordism. Keynote at Co-Laborations: Sharing authorship and space in architectural and urban research, arranged by ResArc. February 11, 2016, Lund University. Ida Börjel, Maria Engberg, Per Linde, Fredrik Emmerfors, and Johan Salo. Follow The Money in the Zany Pharmacy, Workshops, performances and seminars held by The City Fables Group at Transmediale, Berlin, 27-29 January, 2015. | sv |
| art.description.project | In City Fables - Follow the Money we studied and counter-narrated current narrations related to neoliberal place production in Malmö and the language of current capitalism. It began by studying the dominating narratives of Malmö through mass media and policy documents, and research and development projects, which showed that dualistic narratives prevail. The “problematic” sides of Malmö are typically blamed on migration, increased unemployment and segregation and is under constant scrutiny and seen in need of unceasing research and development projects. The Western harbor is narrated as the “successful” side that pulled Malmö out of the post-industrial decline by establishing an entrepreneurial knowledge economy, but has hardly been critically studied.
The lack of analysis of what produces the “successful” side of Malmö led us to study the finance and new media district. Together with artists, journalists, an economic controller and citizens, we analyzed corporate tax data related to the area. Interviews with politicians, government agencies, companies, auditing companies, and activists were carried out in order to gather their voices on corporate taxes.
We experimented with how to narrate our ‘data’ through four cut-out animation films and hand puppet play performances, essays, a poetic dictionary of current economic language, and a mobile phone quiz where people can do a homo economicus personality test. The films Finns Det Svenskt Kaffe in Panama? (Is there Swedish Coffee in Panama?, Den Frustrerade Småföretagarens Väg till Skatteparadiset? (The Frustrated Small Businessman’s Road to a Tax Haven?), Den stora Bidragsfesten (The Big Aid Party), and Samtal med Skatteverket (A Conversation with the Swedish Tax Authorities), done in collaboration with the director Hanna Sköld, counter-narrate dominating Malmö narratives related to corporate taxes. The productions have been published at:
https://medium.com/follow-the-money-malmö
A central concern for the research project was the relationship between art-based research knowledge and fiction. In particular how fables create knowledge and value as well as how knowledge circulates; is remediated and recontexualised. This was productively researched through studying and experimenting with spatial-temporal aesthetic strategies in relation to fiction and finance as both narrativity in fiction and finance deal with meaning over time. Specifically, how the immediate and future comprehension as well as conclusions, relate and will be reached. As Leigh Claire La Berge (2015) argues, realist fiction dealing with the contemporary economy see knowledge emanating from reality which is presented through conclusive fictional narratives often dramaturgically centered around scandals. Postmodern fiction, on the other hand, see finance as producing value through its narration. A value, however, that cannot be temporarily or spatially located and constantly refracts matter and has no resolution or ending. In our aesthetic experiments we have aimed to combine these two views, which feminist epistemological perspectives that acknowledged how research questions and concepts have built into them certain values which frame how the world is to been seen, but that also acknowledged that the world being analyzed, and in our case also creatively interpreted, produces value and knowledge as well. What we argue in relation to art and design-based research knowledge production is that it, just like any science or practice, it produces value in itself through its (aesthetic and political) framings, but is also valued and evaluated in relation to its “indexical” relations to the reality it deals with even when fictionalizing it as well as the productive value of the (art- and design-based) research output.
Another central aesthetic-political challenge is how embodied everyday experiences and perceptions and the abstraction of capital can be combined in aesthetic expressions, which do not become oversimplified and flatten social relation and neither become obfuscating and incomprehensible in their complexity, as discussed by Jeff Kinkle and AlbertoToscano (2015). Specifically, this means dealing with the rhythm and geographies of capital and the narrative disjunction between abstraction and everyday life full of inequalities as experienced by people. Our aim was to make aspects of capitalism, as it relates to Malmö, intelligible while acknowledging that it is a properly unrepresentable totality, which points to the limits of knowledge production and partiality of any accounts.
A central aesthetic-political concern in the productions was thus how to deal with abstractions. Many artistic productions dealing with narratives related to the contemporary economy, not seldom in relation to big cities and their finance centers, although arguing that they are critically exposing contemporary finance tend to treat abstraction as a metaphor for the perceived opaqueness and incomprehensibility of contemporary finance and the impossibility to locate it spatially or as a highly spatial-temporally locatable event in the form of a financial scandal. Likewise, it tends to render finance as pure fiction and pure semiotics detached from reality. Such aesthetic renditions, although claiming to critically expose contemporary finance, tend to reinforce the value and mystification of contemporary finance, as argued by Miriam Meissner (2017).
When we have researched how to counter-narrate the successful side of Malmö we have aimed to identify and specify the relationship between abstraction and embodied sensate everyday experiences. Building on La Berge (2015) we have seen narratives, in financial print culture and in our own creative experiments, as mitigations of abstraction. Both literary fiction and finance print culture are engaged in processes of describing, recording, and writing about a thing or a person delimited to a specific time period. Such description, which are repetitive, are conditioned to lead to value-producing or additive transactions. The abstraction of finance foments between these two operations that produce a spatial-temporal matrix. In our work this has not been a purely linguistic issue, but a question of identifying central spatial-temporal contradictions related to how corporate taxes are described and its value-producing transactions and thereafter experiment with productive ways to rearticulate the relation between description and transaction leading to a different spatial-temporal matrix, for example in relation to taxes and subsidies and taxes and transfer pricing.
References:
Kinkle, Jeff and Toscano, Alberto. Cartographies of the Absolute. Winchester: Zero Books. 2015.
Meissner, Miriam. Narrating the Global Financial Crisis. Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. 2017.
La Berge, Leigh Claire. Scandals and Abstraction. Financial fiction of the long 1980s. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. | sv |
