Spotlight: Femke Herregraven

How much of capitalism can we see from the moon?



When you think of the financial market – insurance, banking, stocks, hedge-funds – you’re likely to conjure images of Wall Street, the City, Hong Kong. Men in pin-striped suits with Versace cufflinks striding down sterilized boulevards and chain-smoking Menthol Superkings in pseudo-public parks, all encased in a labyrinth of glass, steel and Starbucks. You think of the monolithic skyscrapers, of the All Bar Ones and the bottles of Moet. A world that wholly exists inside the parameters of a single square mile, or even just one street. And when you talk of the financial market, it is simply impossible to escape our established nautical lexicon: Flows and ripples of capital; investor liquidity and market equilibrium; dark pools, channels and floating assets. The market has frozen, evaporated. The trickle down effect. 

The immense scale and complexity of the contemporary web of global financial trade, geopolitics and information-technology networks, reduced to a single image or a single metaphor. During this gross consolidation a vast material reality is concealed. These representations curtail and obfuscate an entire economic and political infrastructure that exists hidden in scattered warehouses across northeast China, on the banksides of the Columbia River and across the vast plains of the Icelandic countryside. Finance as ‘hyperobject’: an entity with both global omnipresence and –potence hiding almost entirely beyond human comprehension. 

Working at the intersections of these incommensurable Leviathans, Dutch artist Femke Herregraven has devoted her artistic practice to re-materialising the invisible contours of our contemporary landscapes of financial power. Coming from a background in design, Herregraven has gone on to produce art which stems from an ongoing research project into finding the secret places that capital and data hide – or are hidden. Taking the official form of a printed book in 2011, her still-ongoing project, Geographies of Avoidance, is a quest for the bare realities of tax avoidance through global financial distribution.

After taking up an artist’s residency in Amsterdam’s financial sector, Zuidas, Herregraven became quickly aware of the distinct lack of financial activity that taking place around her. Upon asking her facilitators if there was a list of companies that operated in the building/street, she was met with the reply, ‘No such list exists, and if it did, we wouldn’t give it to you.’ Forced to accumulate the data herself, Herregraven delved into the neighbouring Chamber of Commerce registers and produced a geographical index of the whole of Zuidas. 

Each index in Geographies of Avoidance represents a single address in the district. Some addresses, as shown, have one or two operational businesses and companies registered, some have ten or twenty. And some have a few thousand.

 

 

Geographies of Avoidance, 2011 

In some cases, however, whoever it is rerouting their capital through the Netherlands via these mailbox companies has lost even the faintest sign of discretion. Company titles flow down the page from Alpha 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. To Bravo, Foxtrot 10, V. O. F and Euro Zinger III. Alongside these facetious scripts of nominally-legitimate companies are info-graphics on tax treaties, ‘geopolitical sandwiches’ and BRIC false investments. All painting a rather deft, abstract and fastidious multitude of surreptitious financial smoke-screening. Stark evidence of the seedy and prosaic reality behind filtering your US corporate-capital through an Amsterdam-based radical vegan egg-painting charity called Alpha Yankee Doodle.

Following up from this project came a wish to cognitively map this process of tax avoidance for the everyday subject. Herregraven’s 2013 work, an online video-game called Taxodus, gave the player a chance to embody their favourite multi-national, using live statistics, tax treaties and national tax policies to circumvent their capital across the globe in a game to save as much profit as possible. This online-game, as well as later projects like Liquid Citizenship (2015) – a similar project where you are given an arbitrary national identity and net-worth, and proceed to – using real time statistics – browse your various options of buying citizenship across the globe, and where not possible, your ulterior, shadier options – are both novel attempts by Herregraven to meet the calls of thinkers such as Nick Srnicek, as he outlines the revolutionary necessity of “a navigational medium for making intelligible the dynamics of global capitalism.”[1]

Taxodus, 2013 

Liquid Citizenship, 2015 

More recently, however, Herregraven’s work has become more speculative. In both Malleable Regress (2016) and her ongoing project, Sprawling Swamps (2016 -), Herregraven visualises a fictional scenario, where the interstitial cracks of contemporary legislative and financial borders – ice sheets, waves, swamps, shorelines that drift from one place to another – are populated by futuristic, amphibian microplatforms – Test Den, Swamp of Forked Tongues, Bootleg Tribunal for Nonhumans, Empty Cache; Alpha 1, 2, 3, 4. Platforms established strategically in order to wire-up an ‘optimal high-speed planetary-scale trading infrastructure.’

In her work Malleable Regress, Herregraven has crafted a series of 10 polyurethane-rubber tiles from this digital world, each carrying its own microplatform brand indentity. These moulds are taken from the strange appearance of across UK and EU shores over the last few years, of Tjipetir gutta-percha tiles: slabs of tree-gum made on Indonesian plantations in the late 19th century for the production of the worlds first telegraph cables – the same veins of trade and communication that dominate and structure contemporary finance (it is no coincidence that imperial colonies are the major breeding ground for tax havens). This eerie embodiment fills the objects with the ghosts of failed infrastructures and collapsed worlds, pushing our imagination to the next shift-change in speculative finance. A change with which the majority of us aren’t likely to even witness.


http://femkeherregraven.net/

Look here for Herregraven’s TEDxVaduz talk on her project Geographies of Avoidance.

[1] Nick Srnicek, ‘Accelerationism – ‘Epistemic, Economic, Political’ in Speculative Aesthetics, ed. Robin Macaky et al. (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014): 53.

The Unlimited Dream Company

Press Release for The Unlimited Dream Company

A group show co-organised by Charlie Mills, Ralph Hunter-Menzies and The Hannah Barry Gallery.

Featuring the works of Richard J. Butler, Stevie Dix, Oliver Dook, Angelique Heidler, Lewis Henderson, Ralph Hunter-Menzies, George Rouy and Rosie Grace Ward


“You can lean against us, we’re quite real.”


Taking its cue from J. G. Ballard’s novel of the same name, The Unlimited Dream Company is an exhibition of eight artists, each of whom interrogates a seductive edge of contemporary life. Together their works produce a theatre of sorts, a stage on which converge forces complicated by the thin line that exists between their reality and artificial construction: fantasy, illusion and desire.

Written in 1979, Ballard’s novel follows the protagonist Blake as he explores an exotic universe of salacious orchids, raucous parrots and gesticulating film sets. Emerging from the ruins of an aeroplane crash in the suburb of Thames at Shepperton, Blake’s narrative becomes increasingly suspicious as a gaggle of peculiar characters fight for his attention. Before long Blake’s existence is little other than an anxious daydream – lost in this absurd world, unsure of the reality of his own identity.

The eight artists presented in the show mirror this lack of stabilising narrative. Vanishing tombstones, curious monkeys and bloodied scythes, the exhibition similarly turns our attention to the vexed nature of desire. Affects become a source of craving, colours a form of neuromarketing, the surreal little more than a brand. At times humorous and at others apocalyptic, the exhibition shares with the world of Ballard’s protagonist a fascination with the cabalistic nature of the popular unconscious.

After notions of pastiche and irony have worn thin and epistemological deadlocks have been cast under renewed scrutiny, it seems the worlds of images and matter so essential to these works have acquired a new, active vibrancy. These artists are not united by a common thematic score, nor by a mode of expression. Considered together their works do not represent any collective identity. Rather, encountered here they produce a wormhole, multi-headed and polyvocal. A jigsaw, profuse with the fractured dreams of a generation and emitting an unearthly vibration – shuddering from past to future, optimism to despair, connectivity to isolation.

Punctuating the dark pool of libido that swarmed under society’s belly, Ballard was able to reveal the repressed, the silenced – the desires that bubbled up and squirted through fissures in the social fabric. Now though, the repressed has come to be the admired, the scandalous a pious commodity. Replacing high-rises, hollywood motifs and autoerotica, is the viscous complexion of Seaworld’s whale instructor, the bloodied sheets of a disfigured Tweety, and the nostalgic smog of a misshapen swan… The Unlimited Dream Company is a world of anxiety and ecstasy. One captured trembling, snared between the two.

Fiction: Pool

He sits at the edge of the pool, immersed to the knee in cold, transparent water. The glazed-cream tiles are hard and rub against his tailbone, making it uncomfortable, but a pulsing warm current surrounds his feet from a grilled vent inlaid into the pool’s side-basin, and he enjoys slowly pedalling his feet in its warmth. His arms are angled back, elbows jutting towards the toddler-pool, his body acute to the magnolia ceramic floor. The pool’s filter, pump and heating systems are hung in industrial-type concertina tubes just below the tall ceiling, and his head is cocked back staring up at them: all interlaced and flowing like roots through soil. A drip of water suspends off his ear-lobe, hanging in silence, mesmerizingly so. His chest and abdomen are protracted, the inner nibs of his chest’s rib cage protruding into his porcelain-skin like knuckles back-to-back. The taste of salty perspiration and chlorine mixing in his lips.

In the pool, there’s this guy. Couldn’t be more than thirteen years old, black, and with the body of sumo-wrestler. He’s moving perpendicular to the rest of the swimmers, periodically nose-diving under the red and white toggles that designate this mornings’ AM lane swim, much to the annoyance of the Hexton Healthy Living and Leisure Sports Centre morning-swim patrons. Every morning these patrons steam up and down the short blue arteries of the pool, flexing their bald, jellied limbs and showing off their latest gear: swimsuits, swimcaps, nose-clips, watches, finger-paddles drag-suits etcetera. The boy is wearing two bright-orange armbands, both with the text FLOAT printed in thick black capitals along the side. They’re flailing around wildly, slapping and squelching on the waters’ surface, a forcefield of spritzing water emerging. A deranged form of front-crawl that looks more like treading water on speed. They disappear occasionally under the water to push air bubbles out of the boy’s Hawaiian trunks. This lad, who couldn’t be younger than eleven years old, has fingers that look like Twinkies, and he has those weird rinds of meaty flesh at the base of his neck. Even the boys eyes, magnified under the transparent plastic of his goggles, look fat and bulging; like they’re ready to burst. Occasionally it is not apparent whether the boy is in fact swimming or simply trying not to drown. The morning-swim and steam-room routine is to many a coveted ritual. A pre-work custom for the white-collar workers of the Plaza. Where before they spend eight-hours a day aggregating rail fiscal reports or analysing annual insurance statistics, or at best, developing market-brands for 3-D printed air-freshener dispensers, they can submerge themselves in an ostensibly personally motivated regime of health and fitness and psychic well-being, length after length, steam after steam.

The patrons of this leisure-centre are very annoyed at this young, porcine boy. His seal-like nose-dives produce mini-tidal waves that ripple across the pool, and it is ambiguous sometimes as to whether the spuming bubbles to his rear as indeed a product of his trunk’s enclosed air pockets, or in fact sign of a more unsavoury and thus nauseating process. It is the seventh time in the last two weeks that this boy has interrupted their attempts at fitness and health and psychic well-being. If the uncoordinated efforts of this young Fijian kid continues to disrupt their AM slot at HHLLSC, these patrons will all but be forced to move centre. However, being equidistant between the SE Pheltz burbs and the Plaza, and its extremely convenient placing right opposite North Hexton Station, which has a divergent link-up rail to each quadrant of the Plaza, this centre is pragmatically sound, and any detour taken to a similar centre that would too house a 50m pool and steam/sauna room, would require both time and effort. The most annoying thing about this kid is his factious looking grin. Completely and utterly one-hundred-and-ten-percent unaware of his own behaviour. It’s infuriating. This huge wide mouth, grinning. Like he’s taking the piss; drooling out of the corners of his pink lips. Smiling from cheek to cheek, daydreaming that one cinematic shot from the Marks & Spencer’s Christmas ad: the one where they pour chocolate sauce all over their Christmas Black Forest Gateau while the overtly sexual female narrator whispers its soft, spongey texture to you. There’s nothing more infuriating to the patrons of HHLLSC than the glib playfulness and merriment of this overweight child. He’s always alone when he’s in the pool.

She’s swimming breast-stroke in the lane directly in front of him, away from him, in the medium lane. She’s wearing a mulberry-toned Adidas swimsuit, with three pink strips either side that curve over her chest and hips. She has small breasts but you can still see her nipples through the Nylon fabric. And although he finds it weirdly perverse and cliché to look at her nipples, he still does. Her hair is auburn brown, more like a light mahogany, gliding the surface like a bride’s dress, and her skin is cherry tanned. Her swimsuit compliments her skin with a kind of exotic oaky plum colour set. Her movements in the water are frictionless. Even her tucks and spins resemble some kind of smooth under-water ballet. She comes here before she goes to school at the Hexton College of Contemporary Fine Arts and Craft down the road, and he comes to see her swim. She’s wearing forest-green nail varnish with a hint of teal. Her eyebrows are thin and symmetrical, plucked to perfection. There’s no one else in her lane and the ripples of her strokes are still visible behind her. The kid has made his way well over to the fast lanes by now – the pool-house slowly filling with pernicious stares and bitter inner-monologues – and she seems almost blissful, alone, in the lane in front of him.

They are friends of course, He and She. But whether anything more than just friends, both of them are still unsure. She comes here before she goes to school because it’s convenient and free way for her to acquire some fitness and health and relaxation, and he comes here for the same reasons too, he tells her. He too is a student at the HCCFAC but is the kinda person who prefers online video-gaming and Red Planet pizza to bike-rides and smoothies. She knows this anyway, I mean, she’s very well aware that he’s not waking up at 7AM each morning and getting the bus to Hexton for a quick dash of cardiovascular exercise and psychic well-being, he gets his psychic well-being in the centrefold pages of GQ magazine five days a week. They meet at 7:30AM each weekday morning, eat breakfast – she eats muesli with honey whilst he eats a cup of Tetley and three fags – and hop on the 324 to Plaza Street M, alighting at North Hexton Station and walking under the dim-lit and graffiti-ridden underpass to the leisure centre stood opposite. They have lived together for six months since leaving their halls of residence – an old refurbished psychiatric hospital just down the road from HCCFAC. They now live in a small ex-social house down by Lenox House Housing Estate in Lenox, the ceilings barely higher than your head and the walls paper-thin. They live with two others, both male, and they have unspoken feelings for each other (He and She that is). The pool-house is flourescently lit.

The young boy is wreaking havoc to the right hand side of the pool, in the fast lanes, where the majority of the morning-swim-ritualists stroke up and down. His left armband has got caught on one of the red toggles and water is being thrust every which way as he tries to escape. His neck rinds writhing up and down like an accordion, the occasional gasp breaking his excited whooping. A lady who’d been sitting reading on the mezzanine creaks her neck forward over the railing to look down. There’s no lifeguard in the hall just an empty lifeguard chair. It’s unclear whether this kid needs help anyway, or whether this is just part of his wisecracking performance piece. It clear that the wannabe-professional swimmers amongst the fast-laners favour the latter. Butterball[i] then launches his inflated armband, which surrounds an already inflated looking upper-arm, away from the toggle, its back-ping almost K.O.ing a poor, old retiree named Mildred in the medium lane behind him. Unawares, his grin left unfazed and immaculate, he continues his war path for the top lane, eyeballed by every-single Speedo-sporting fast-lane-aficionado in the place.

He’s shifted his arms forward and is now lent over his chest pondering his latest tattoo – a hollow Moline crucifix administered DIY by his good friend with a blunt HB pencil and sewing needle three nights prior. The ends of the arms are bifurcated and curved back, originally a heraldic form found in the coat of arms of Molyneux and the House of Brogile, but appropriated here with little sense of genealogy or founding. More of an aesthetic judgement than anything else. He wonders what the patrons will think of it, indeed what anyone would think of it. But not in a regretful or worried manner, simply a curious one. He has several other tattoos, mostly stick-n-poke, crudely administered by his associates during times of mild intoxication and boredom. He has a lean build, almost muscular but tip-toeing towards thin. Hands that are dainty and feminine with one silver signet-ring inlaid with onyx on his right pinkie, a gift from Her. Yesterday night he bleached the back of his hair peroxide and now his head looks like a reverse-light bulb. He’s originally from Truro, Cornwall, but spent the last few years before moving down to the great Philly in Sheffield, Yorkshire. As a result his accent is a deformed hybrid: swathes of old English queen’s tongue mixed with a twangy lack of /a:/ pronunciation – pronouncing cast more lie kasst – and assimilating SE argot like wah’gwan and ‘nang’ into his daily lexicon.

Poor old dear Mildred is now hoiking her wrinkly old jaundiced-self up onto the magnolia ceramic, her elbows about to give in under the weight, in a fixed although rather sedate temper. There’s a tall guy, the body of a Conger eel: long, annular and his skin a nuanced grey. He’s wearing black speedo pants and a black speedo swim-cap. He’s revolving his arms like bungee-cords clockwise-then-anti-clockwise, slapping his wrists against his hips at full-circle in a sort of trance-state. Upon hearing a forlorn whimper to his left from the fragile OAP clinging to the edge of the pool, half scrabbled onto the shiny cream tiles – normally shed use the pool steps but after receiving a nearly knockout punch from the red toggle lane divider she’s precariously attempting to clamber the pool’s concave perimeter up front – he extends a long, tube-like arm towards her, hand spread eagle in offered relief. The young boy still splashing and frolicking. The lady on the mezzanine is back immersed in her book. Mildred is hauled up out of the water, her dentures a bit loose and every tissue sagging; her hair is electric-shock white and her eyes heavily bloodshot from the chlorine. The eel man turns his attention to the boy with a malign scope. The other lungbusters follow suit: the eel man is kind of their unofficially elected head, with his gelatine like limbs and 24second 50m freestyle. They’ve all stopped swimming now, they-re just treading-water and eyeballing this flat blubber, occasionally raising their incisored eyebrows to glance over at Mildred and check her footing.

She’s still swimming, unvexed and tranquil. He’s still checking out his wonky tattoo, and the lady on the mezzanine has now disappeared. The kid, otherwise known as Ayoyo Tomasi, twelve years old and avid Pokemon Go'er, has also stopped swimming – if you can call it that – as if his somewhat crazed behaviour is still dependent on the likewise activities of those around him; as if their stationary demeanour suddenly thwacks the kid with a cataplectic anxiety wave, rendering him motionless. It’s unclear whether the boy is aware of their discontent or is simply disgruntled by their sudden ceasing of movement. He’s liked her for about four months now. He doesn’t know whether she likes him; she knows that he likes her. All of a sudden the boy is crying, his face has curled up into a closed fist without eyes. The eel man steadies Mildred whose knees are permanently crooked forward like an early Neanderthal, and gears his thumb and forefinger like a pincer toward the crying boy.

‘Look kid, enough’s enough.’

The pool-house is silent but for the kid’s groaning and the industrial-type filter, pump and heating systems that chug and whir overhead. The annular man’s voice is firm and derisory.

She reaches the other side of the pool and her legs fold forward until her body floats congruent to the pool’s edge. Drips of water run down her cheeks and back into the pool. She turns, her eyes on fire. He can see her slender legs slowly paddling under the water, hypnotic. Eye lids fluttering upward until they meet his. The pool-house is completely silent. He can no longer feel the pain of his tailbone against the tiles. Everything in his periphery is a blur. She pulls herself back up against the pool-side and giggles. He smiles and slides himself forward, falling into the water like you would a deep sleep.

[i] Butterball, Gloob, Slab, Lardturb, Fat Gallon, Blubber Boy, Hippopotamouth, The Whole Nine Tones, are but some of the nicknames that the strenuously over-weight and unbelievably blithe youngster has acquired via and amongst the patrons in his short time wreaking havoc at the HHLLSC AM slots.