20 RED LIGHTS

This project is the result of the collaboration with Blai Tomas, Jade de Robles, Greater than or Equal to, Franco Bifo Berardi, Michel Feher, Arnaud Bayle and four Wall Street executives.

20 RED LIGHTS includes the following works:

  • Video – 20 Red Lights
  • Photographs – 20 Red Lights series
  • Photographs – 20 Investors series
  • Photographs – 20 Imaginary Prisons series
  • Book – Twenty Red Lights, published by La Virreina/La Fabrica
  • Essays by Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Michel Feher.
  • Talks, seminars & open discussion forums.

VIDEO – 20 RED LIGHTS (15 minutes in loop)

The video consists of scripted interviews with four Wall Street executives. Their arguments touch upon meritocracy and self-realization, the benefits of financial deregulation, the social value of financial intermediation, and inequality. The executives’ arguments are, from their particular logic, irrefutable. Once we enter the universe of their language game, everything makes sense. The interviewees are ideological products and, at the same time, sophisticated ideology reproducers.

The visuality of the video is both striking and familiar. It shows the delirium of the new digital imagination that prevents distance and critical perspective.

PHOTOGRAPHS – 20 RED LIGHTS (20 photos)

The instruments of contemporary finance share one single objective: to break the modernist risk/return equation. In the world of abstract economy, the financial oligarchy captures most of the value while society bears the most significant risks.

20 Red Lights lists and defines the twenty key financial instruments used to achieve this purpose. They represent the core of contemporary finance technology. Unless these specific instruments are politically addressed, nothing will change. They are 20 red lights flashing in our landscapes, waiting for somebody to switch them off.

PHOTOGRAPHS – 20 INVESTORS (20 photos)

The true sites of power are not buildings but a single, digital, non-referential and abstract number residing in the indefinite world of the computers: the assets under management. The red number in each photography is meaningless, but it is all what matters to each of the world’s twenty largest investors.

PHOTOGRAPHS – 20 IMAGINARY PRISONS (20 photos)

The headquarters of the twenty largest investors in the world are gigantic spaces empty of anything of value.