Online ‘live’ screening of Vermeir & Heiremans’ A Modest Proposal on the platform Weird Economies alongside a conversation with writer and curator Bassam El Baroni
Online
13/02/2022, 19h
A transcription of the interview and film will be accessible on the web platform afterwards.
Weird Economies (W.E) is an online art project that traces economic imaginaries extraordinary to financial arrangements of our time. W.E takes on an expanded chrono-political strategy, wherein past (vindication), present (location), and future (fabrication) are commensurable grounds for the extrapolation of weird—and weirder—economies. What are the affordances of art in envisioning a life beyond financialisation? Art and finance hold a complex relationship. Financialisation is a prevalent factor shaping the cultural sector today. The normalization of economic illiquidity in the art world underlies the routine challenges around art workers’ solidarity with one another to formulate an adequate response to their field’s complicity with capitalisation of cities and its effects on their own social habitat and environment. At the same time, the generation of speculative value drives both regimes of art and finance. Given this historical synergy, can the art system become a testing ground to examine new methods for cooperation in a financialised life?