BLACK BOOK

This project is the result of the collaboration with Blanco White, Oscar Perales, Marc Sans, Stephen Richards, Lisbeth Ulrich, and Arnaud Bayle.

BLACK BOOK includes the following works:

  • Video – Black Book
  • Photographs – OECD series
  • Installation – Oxfam series
  • Photographs – Collect on your Collection
  • Essays – Pending
  • Talks, seminars & open discussion forums

VIDEO – BLACK BOOK (17 minutes in loop)

Structured following the eight chapters of Rimbaud’s “Une Saison en Enfer”, Black Book unveils the concepts, language and concerns of corporate tax law professionals; the simplicity of the legal structures for tax avoidance; and the enthusiastic complicity of governments. The choice of animation as the medium for this video relates to this infrastructure’s symbolic but vital pulsion.

PHOTOGRAPHS – OECD series (9 photos)

Multinational’s tax base erosion and profit shifting has proven extremely difficult to deter because of governmental and corporate lobbying. Summarized below each image, the necessary 9 key actions to eliminate legal tax avoidance face the hard consistency of the reification produced by ideology.

INSTALLATION – OXFAM series (Grid of 15 photos)

In its efforts to highlight the tax avoidance impact on extreme poverty, Oxfam ranked the 15 worst offenders’ jurisdictions in 2016. Out of fifteen, five were European (Netherlands, Luxemburg, Ireland, Cyprus and Jersey) and another five belonged to the Commonwealth. These jurisdictions have a strong similarity to viruses, as is apparent from the following definition: “Viruses are intracellular parasites, which by definition contain either a RNA or DNA genome surrounded by a protective, virus-coded protein coat. Viruses may be viewed as mobile genetic elements, most probably of cellular origin and characterized by a long co-evolution of virus and host.” Medical Microbiology, Samuel Baron

PHOTOGRAPHS – ART & INVESTMENT series (23 photos)

The business of art, for all its high-minded language, not only shares but leads the traits of post-Fordist capitalism. Precarity, speculation, inequality, value abstraction, dematerialization, intermediation,…, have all been present since the beginning of this century. The business of art is one of the favored mechanisms por money laundering and tax evasion.