Production Residency: Artist Development Fund, June 2020
While financial frameworks are often invisible, we inhabit them daily, both directly in how we buy products and earn wages and in how finance creates and maintains value systems. This invisibility is typically visualised through statistics, which abstracts data by decoupling it from a physical root in order to make an image, such as an infographic. I choose to disrupt how statistical data is used and understood, as a response to how it celebrates neoliberal growth with the often positive connotation of a rising statistical line – such as the rising value of a currency. I am interested in examining how the economic frameworks created by states use institutional languages to limit perceptions of the world in which we live.
2007 marked the birth of the green bond market, enabling a financial link between investors and environmental preservation. Half of the project expands the complexity of this relationship between financial institutions and natural resources in a series of six framed emails. In these emails, placed in an alternative present, Draftia has applied for a loan to build a windfarm with the Green Department of Protections. Their fictional correspondence imagines possible conflicts, such as not being able to provide a map, and poetic similarities through the mutual support Draftia finds in the loan and the GDP team has in gaining an understanding of Draftian culture. As these characters reply in different times and places, so too are the emails spread around both buildings, never read beside each other and always with a direction in between. Moving from the wind to the floor, these frictions in how information is represented continue in the second work. Assembled with a collection of stained ceramic tiles, they visualise the projected cost of carbon up to 2050. Sitting within this stratified cost is a stone block, digitally carved with the Multilateral Development Bank’s climate finance commitments in the last 10 years. Using data as a tool which carves shapes, such as the line formed by a statistical chart, these two graphics embody the landscape we are currently shaping through climate finance. Both works act to pluralise current conversations about green investment through fictional discussion and the rearrangement of public statistics, to question how we can place an economic value on our environment and if not, what alternatives we are left with.
All works are a part of the EIB Permanent Collection.
Foundations, 2020
Dimensions: Stone 50cm X 50cm, tiles 10cm X 10cm each
Materials: Digitally carved sandstone block, fired ceramic tiles stained with natural oxides
Shown at: European Investment Bank, Luxembourg as part of the Artist Development Program residency, 2023, Belonging, Vincent Bournes Gallery, Limerick (Ireland), 2022
Images taken by David Laurent
Drafting communication, drafting climate, drafting futures, 2020
Dimensions: Series of six (6) 30cm x 45.4cm prints
Materials: Framed digital prints of text.
Shown at: Shown in the European Investment Bank, Luxembourg as part of the Artist Development Program, 2023, TULCA, Printworks Gallery, 2024
Images taken by David Laurent