Destroy All Economic Representations

Lecture-Performance by Georgios Papadopoulos.

The establishment of the common currency in the core of the EU in 2002 (and virtually in the financial markets two years earlier), was intended as a uniform technical standard of economic accounting that would direct the integration of the Union. The phenomenal illusion of an independent and neutral measure of economic value is the symptom of the universalization of the market system of valuation in its more aggressive and paranoid incarnation. The Euro gave material form to the idea of money in day-to-day transactions, adding a tractable identity to the master signifier of economic value. A gift of death that subordinates all life to a hyper-rational process of financialization.

The motivation behind the lecture-performance, in the course of a radical critique of the market interpretation of 'Europe', is to short-circuit the EU-ideology of efficiency and growth attacking its discourse and its iconography. During the event different techniques are going to be employed in order to short circuit all forms of economic representation; theoretical critique is going to be combined with poetry, performance with aesthetic analysis, politics is going to be infected by art. A series of statements, images and gestures against the paranoia of the market and the greed of the apologists of finance; manifestos of liberation, haikus of disengagement and passivity, poetry of desublimation. Word becoming the new unit of currency in a hopeless, self-defeating attempt to counter the impossible exchange with the financial terror.

Georgios Papadopoulos combines economics, philosophical analysis and aesthetics with an exploratory artistic practice. His research gravitates around money and its socioeconomic functions. He studied Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics and has completed his PhD at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. In 2008 and 2009 Papadopoulos was a researcher at the theory department of Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and in 2012 was awarded the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research from the School of Fine Arts and the transmediale festival in Berlin. Currently he is researching digital payments, with a particular interest in cryptocurrencies, their operating principles and their aesthetics.

Language: English