The Art of Unpayable Debts: Poisoned Reproduction, Financial Sovereignty and Settler Colonial Bonds

The Art of Unpayable Debts: Poisoned reproduction, financial sovereignty and settler colonial bonds

FORTHCOMING in Featherstone, M., ed. The Sociology of Debt. Bristol: Policy Press, 2019.

UNCORRECTED PROOFS

This chapter provides a reading unpayable financial debts as a and a contextualization of three recent methodology of domination that performative public artworks to map secures exploitation, extraction, the way unpayable debts manifest oppression and/or inequality; In the across politics, economics, culture and second place the way that these same society under the global order of systems and structures of financialized financialized capitalism today. By power depend upon the unpayable debts here I have in mind disappearance, denial or diversion of both, on the one hand, the the unpayable debts owed to or proliferation of financial debts that claimed by the dominated and cannot be repaid and, on the other, the exploited on which they are, subterranean collective moral or ultimately, based. My effort here is not political debts that, though they cannot to provide a comprehensive be quantified, are no less real or theorization of the topic of unpayable important for that. Starting with a brief debts, but rather to map some consideration of the power and coordinates that, between them, materiality of the imagination as a key triangulate the particular ways that, in dimension of capitalism’s the current financialized global order, financialization, I then turn to a a dialectics of unpayability plays out. reading of UK artist Darren Cullen’s Pocket Money Loans (2012-present), The Imaginable and the Argentine artist Marta Minujín’s Unimaginable Payment of Greek Debt to Germany with The bulk of my previous studies Olives and Art (2017), and Anishinaabe have been dedicated to the question of artist Rebecca Belmore’s Gone Indian the relationship between (2009). I am in search of two parallel financialization and the imagination, counter-currents: In the first place, the including the ways in which various way dominant systems and structures forms and formats of contemporary of financialized power impose debt both depend on and also help

hold in place a set of materially Cornelius Castoriadis (1997a) whose expressed tropes, ideas, images, original and radical theories of the behaviours and relationships in the imagination aimed to highlight the realm we typically call “culture” importance of autonomy and collective (Haiven, 2014, 2011, 2017). After all, struggle. For Castoriadis the radical while debt may be inscribed on imagination was not (as the term is contracts, or manifested on computer often mobilized today) simply a screens, held in databases, or euphemism for Left-wing activist experienced in the form of worry, ideologies. Instead, it was a tectonic privation and austerity, it is, to a large force at the core of both the subject and extent imaginary. I mean this both in their society. The radical imagination the sense that it has no material (radical here deriving from the Latin presence and also in the sense that, origins of the word, referring to roots) were all those who imagine a debt to was an ever-unsettled and unsettling perish or disappear or lose their force at the core of social life, and also memories, the debt would, ultimately, out of which subjects and social vanish. institutions are formed (see Haiven and But this definition of Khasnabish, 2014). He likens the “imaginary” as something that radical imagination to magma, which “doesn’t exist in the material world” erupts through the earth’s crust in can become deceptive and unhelpful molten, liquid form before, with because it describes most of the exposure to surface elements, cooling important things in our societies, too. and solidifying into seemingly durable Nation-states and their borders, for rock formations (Castoriadis, 1997b). instance, or fiat currencies, or ranks or Castoriadis’s decidedly anti-Lacanian hierarchies among human beings - all approach sees human development as are obviously “real” but at the same the dialectic play of an open-protean time deeply imaginary: a border is a eruption of desire, curiosity and line on a map, a fiat currency is just a creativity which, in various forms and token, and a king is just a man. Until various ways, solidifies into stable and unless their power, authority and subjects and relationships, only to be value is consolidated through a kind of unsettled in various ways and at orchestration of the collective various times (Urribarri, 2002). imagination, usually backed by the Likewise, Castoriadis theorized society implicit or explicit threat of violence, as the solidifications of the radical expulsion or privation (see Graeber, imagination, the petrification of 2007). imaginative and imaginary structures This approach the imagination into hardened institutions (material is inspired by the work of dissident and cultural) that, in turn, shape and Marxist and psychoanalytic thinker channel the future flows of the radical

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imagination, though in times of great mediate between capitalism’s abstract change these, too, can be swept away and concrete registers of power. by new, violent eruptions, including, Other chapters in this book notably, revolutions. explore these tensions in much more From this angle, naming debt as depth and rigour. My desire here is a structure of the imagination is not simply to frame the role and aimed at discrediting it as “unreal,” for importance of art when it comes to it is just as “real” as any other social debt. This importance stems from a institution. But it is to say, in a way that certain dialectic which I have explored is echoed in David Graeber’s (2011) in more detail in my book Art after magisterial anthropological Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies comparison of dozens of different Against Financialization (Haiven, 2018). civilizations, that the forms debt takes On the one hand, as numerous art will always have a great deal to tell us historians have shown, within the about the relations of social power at worldview out of which today’s forms play. For this reason, Graeber cautions of global, debt-driven capitalism grew that our current association of debt -- which is to say a Western European, with quantifiable monetary measures is patriarchal, protestant and colonial both recent and potentially framework -- art has become perhaps misguiding. We ought to look deeper the sole sphere of sanctioned activity than the particularity of the number where society is permitted to, for lack and, instead, take a more properly of a better term, self-consciously anthropological view of how these “works” on the structures of the relationships, symbols and (in our imagination. Due in large part to the terms) imaginary structures are way that the sphere of activities we reproduced by power and today associate with “art” also reproductive of it. The numbers matter historically produced rarified, unique to the extent they have their own tale artifacts for bourgeois consumption to tell about the integration of debt into and social reproduction, it has, a capitalist economy of labour throughout modernity, signalled a exploitation and alienation certain space of relative autonomy superintended by money, and because from a direct subordination to it helps us identify the particular way capitalist reason, and also a certain capitalist forms of debt braid together freedom from conservative social or both political-economic and moral / religious forces (Bürger, 1984). This cultural power with such devastating has bestowed on art an almost revered effects, what Miranda Joseph (2014), status, and also offered artists an drawing on interlocutors in the field of always historically-specific limited critical accounting studies, has framed latitude to explore social and human as the way regimes of quantification questions and problems in uniquely

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incisive and challenging ways. But, by financialization, when debt, credit and the same token, this has equally meant seemingly more abstract forms of that this thing we call “art” has had an money come to rule. Surely art, that uncomfortable proximity to money in sphere of activities historically and ways that should put to rest any high- institutionally associated with the work minded moralism or sanctimony about of the imagination, should have its transcendental potentials (Bourdieu, something to offer us as capital appears 1993). As long as there has been such a to become more imaginary and thing as “art” (as distinct from craft, imaginative, for instance in the from religious iconography, or from supremacy of increasingly arcane ornament) it has been inscribed in a derivatives contracts, or the tangled relationship with money and, gladiatorial battler of trading robots, or indeed, with debt (Wolff, 1984; Groys, simply in the sublime alacrity with 2011). which nearly every human good, from It is not only the case that artists basic food to education, is transformed are always poor and in debt: it is that into an object of speculation (Sholette the myth that artists are always poor and Ressler, 2013). More importantly, and in debt participates in, and helps in an age when artists represent some mask, a deeper set of beliefs that art of the most precarious and indebted and money are fundamentally workers in the brave new “creative opposed. But it is precisely this economy” of “first-world” cities, might mythical opposition that guarantees artists’ proximity to debt mean that, art’s unicorn-like economic value even beyond any residual autonomy within capitalism, and its other (social, art may have, these workers might cultural, symbolic) values within have something to teach us, not so capitalist societies (see Velthuis, 2007; much by what they produce but how Beech, 2016). My efforts, along with they produce. (see La Berge and others, has been to argue that it is not Hannah, 2015; Rosler, 2013)? art’s critical distance from and innocence of capitalism that makes it Unpayable Debts such an important vantage point to My curiosity is stimulated here examine capitalism; it is precisely art’s because I am trying to understand a weird proximity to and collusion with sort of meta-phenomenon of debt capitalism that makes it so interesting which otherwise can’t quite be named, when it turns its gaze on phenomena and which certainly can’t be admitted like economics, money or debt (Malik, by the technicians and defenders of the 2008; Vishmidt, 2013; La Berge, 2015; financialized neoliberal model of Fraser, 2012). global capitalism: the growth and This is, I have sought to argue, proliferation of unpayable debts. By all the more so in an age of

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unpayable debts I mean those that are, 2012; Dymski, 2009; Wyly, 2010). either by design or by contingency, While we cannot know the motivations impossible to close, but which of the borrowers -- elsewhere I nonetheless continue to function in a (Haiven, 2013) have suggested, at least disciplinary way over the debtor. My at the level of class struggle, such loans curiosity here is in line with the may represent an unconscious attempt inquiries of Graeber (2011), Maurizio to reclaim a share of wealth -- the Lazzarato (2012; 2015) and Joseph lenders clearly did not believe the debts (2014) who investigate the powers of would ever be repaid: the business- debt in an age of financialization. But model relied on selling access to it is also particularly drawn to the revenue streams from these securitized question of when debts are widely debts in tranches to investors, thus on acknowledged to be unpayable, as some level the hope was that they explored in the case of Puerto Rico by would never be repaid, and they would Columbia Universoty’s Unpayable simply continue to produce revenue Debts Working Group.1 In these cases, (see Taibbi, 2010). As Andrew Ross the tangled ropework of ideology that (2014) notes in his cross-sectional conventionally legitimates debt begins analysis of the American debt to fray, revealing the frictions, economy, the ideal for the sellers of stresslines and contradictions that have debt today are not “deadbeat” clients always been present in the global debt who do as they think they ought and order. pay down their loans on time or early We might here think of the but, rather, “revolvers,” who barely archetypical sub-prime loans that were pay the interest each month, without power-sold to poor and working class effecting the outstanding principle. Americans in the first decade of the 21st This is a condition that many people century, the “toxicity” of which led to can relate to in an age when a forty- such dramatic consequences in 2007 year stagnation in real (inflation and 2008. As has been extensively adjusted) wages for the poor and catalogued, these loans, many of them working class has been accompanied made to so-called NINJA borrowers by rising fuel and housing prices, and (No Income, No Job or Assests), were the gradual privatization or from the outset sabotaged with quickly marketization of many necessities rising interest rates that seemingly (education, transportation, healthcare, everyone involved (from the child- and elder-care, etc), causing a salespeople to the mortgage lenders massive increase in consumer debt, they represented to the banks that defaults and bankruptcies (Aitken, securitized the loans to the rating 2015; Dienst, 2011). agencies that gave them the stamp of On the world stage, of course, approval) knew would fail (Aalbers, unpayable debts have been a staple of

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global political economy for some owed to African and Caribbean time. On the one hand, powerful G8 nations, for the burden of colonialism nations perpetually roll-over and and the transatlantic slave trade, and indeed increase their debt loads in also owed to the Black descendants of order to finance the operations of those enslaved people in Brazil, the governments parched for revenue United States and elsewhere who still thanks to decades of corporate tax cuts today suffer the consequences and (see Soederberg, 2014). When talk of endure the regimes of racial capitalism balancing budgets or paying off the built on top of slavery (see Beckles, debt is mobilized, it is usually as a 2013; Coates, 2014; Feagin, 2014; punitive measure aimed at cutting Salzberger and Turck, 2004; Feagin, social spending (see Stanford, 2008; 2014). I am thinking of the unpayable Pettifor, 2017). On the other hand, it is debts owed to the world’s Indigenous impossible to ignore that the people for the theft of land and for the contemporary world system is genocidal policies of settler colonial structured by the patently unpayable governments that, to this day, seek to debts of many of the world’s poorest eliminate autonomous Indigenous nations who, in the post-colonial presence on land in the name of moment, were offered (frequently capitalist extraction and exploitation usurious) loans to assist with capitalist (Coulthard, 2014; Wolfe, 2016; modes of development (see Bello, Simpson, 2014). I am thinking about 2013; Ndikumana and Boyce, 2011). the notion of climate debt owed largely Yet still these debts persist, even when by wealthy (once-imperialist) carbon- the promised development never intensive nations to those billions of materialized, or when the money was poor people around the world who will stolen by dictators or corrupt officials, disproportionately suffer the impacts of or when it is patently obvious that the global warming, desertification, the debt imposes a disastrous impediment acidification and pollution of the ocean to the kind of economic growth it and so many other ecological ills would require to actually pay off the (Klein, 2015). And more deeply I am debt, let alone improve the living thinking about the deep debts, or standards of the population (Toussaint, “social bonds” that hold societies 2015; George, 1990). together, but that are systematically On some deeper level still, my invisblized within the capitalist interest is in the deeper, unpayable economy, for instance the debts of debts on which the global capitalist current generations to the past, or the system is based, but which cannot be sort of reciprocal bonds of obligation admitted or accepted within the that bind together communities and prevailing economic logic. Here I am families, the sine qua non of social thinking, for instance, of the debts

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reproduction (Dienst, 2011; Federici, Stakemeier and Vishmidt, 2016) and 2013; Graeber, 2011; Ross, 2014). Leigh Claire La Berge (La Berge and The three artistic projects Hannah, 2015; La Berge, 2019), these analyzed here each, to my mind, take participatory and performative art up the question of unpayable debts in practices offer particularly important different frameworks, and in each case vantage points to examine I want to draw out and contrast two financialization, again, not because modalities of the unpayable debt. Each they stand so far outside of it, but piece, on the surface, engages with a because they are ultimately wrought of manifest form of unpayable debt that the same material (Haiven, 2018). The signals the way debt is used as a participatory turn in contemporary art weapon or tool of oppression and signals a moment not only when art exploitation in this economic moment. becomes more fully integrated into the But each piece also signals towards an circuits of global capitalism, but when unspoken, perhaps unspeakable those circuits become more art-like in structure of a deeper, more profound their operations (Davis, 2018). debt. Indeed, my curiosity here leads My effort here is not to provide me to seek, beyond the stated or any sort of comprehensive thesis: it is probable intention of each artist, the valuable to engage with (good) art deeper currents of debt at work, the precisely because, in spite of rumbling of the radical imagination everything, it touches the unknown. below, that animates these works in a One of art’s enduring values is that it moment of unpayable debts. holds open a potentially critical space I have selected these three artists where one might, for a moment, as if in part because, thematically, their from the corner of one’s eye, catch a three respective works triangulate the glimpse of the systems, structures, field I am trying to understand: how patterns and pressures that are unpayable debts become an otherwise too fast, too contradictory, infrastructure for the reproduction of too intimate or too uncanny to be financialized capitalism. But I have systematically observed. As Randy also opted for these artists and projects Martin (2015) shows, this is not because each engages the topic because of some residual tenacity of the through a combination of autonomous, romantic imagination participation, spectacle and but, rather, because art reserves a performance, as opposed to more space to explore the way economic conventional visual methods of systems — especially financialization expression. For reasons I have — recalibrate the field of sociality. My explored in some detail elsewhere, and conjecture here is that the that have been brilliantly explained by phantasmatic structure of unpayable critics Marina Vishmidt (2015; debts that haunt our planet and our

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lives today are so ubiquitous, so of consumerism, the financialization of familiar and so alien that it may only housing and the commodification of be in this sort of art that we can fathom “service” labour all conspire to make their ectoplasm, and the way that they everyday life a field for the exploitation are connected structurally, historically of labour and the extraction of rents and in ways that connect the social, the (Federici, 2012; Bhattacharya, 2017). economic, the aesthetic, the political Nowhere is this more clearly seen than and the inter-subjective. Here I have in the emergence of the “metropolitan mind to read these artworks for how factory,” the way that the social fabric they help reveal what Avery Gorden of global cities are transformed into (2008), drawing on Jacques Derrida zones for speculation and the (1994), calls the hauntology of power (see ratcheting-up of a kind of ambient also Gilman-Opalsky, 2016; M. Fisher, capitalist discipline (Shukaitis, 2015). 2014) and, in the terms offered by Perhaps the most recognizable Stevphen Shukaitis (2016), offer geographic symptom of these ills are resources for thinking through the manifestations of “fringe finance” rebellious strategies of movements-yet- institutions: payday lenders, cheque- to-come. cashing outfits, pawn shops and other businesses who prey upon the urgent

Pocket Money Loans needs of the poor and so-called “unbanked,” who are North London, circa 2014, is a disproportionately migrants, people of silent war zone. Once home to a colour and members of the working diversity of ethnicities trying to make a class squeezed by the financialized living and a life in the capital of the recalibration of cities (Aitken, 2007; British Empire, gentrification and Deville, 2015; Servon, 2017). rampant housing speculation in the For this reason, when a small neoliberal period have profoundly independent art gallery in North transformed the social fabric London’s rapidly gentrifying (Hubbard, 2017; De Verteuil, 2018). It neighbourhood of Stoke Newington is important to see this as one of the appeared to have been replaced by a ways financialization acts as a new payday loan shop, it is unlikely mechanism through which capitalism anyone paid much attention. Those further infiltrates and recalibrates the who did were horrified. With a design field of social reproduction.(see palette and cutesy icons reminiscent of Haiven, 2014 especially ch.2) Whereas children’s Saturday morning cartoon once capitalism seemed content to advertisements, the boutique offered exploit the time of workers in the “Payday loans 4 kids!” at a mere factory for a wage, today the 5000% annual percentage rate (APR) mechanisms of debt, the acceleration interest. The interior of the gallery /

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store featured comically austere unscrupulousness of the fringe finance environment surrounded by posters industry and the ubiquity of encouraging children to take out a loan increasingly invasive advertising backed by toy cars, or for a tooth fairy targeting children that they failed to offering “cash 4 teeth,” or mortgages note the satire (loans to children, while on bouncy castles, and “pro-aging entirely plausible, are illegal in the cream.” “We help you buy the things UK). The artist would receive similar you can’t afford!” reads a speech backlash -- which he leveraged into bubble emanating from a decal of the widespread media attention -- at shop’s mascot, a cartoon coin, subsequent iterations of the installation plastered at toddler-height on the at galleries, exhibitions (including gallery’s front door. Banksy’s widely-visited Dismaland

Figure 1 - Darren Cullen, Pocket Money Loans, installation at ICON Gallery 2012. Darren Cullen’s Pocket Money temporary theme park) and outdoor Loans immediately drew harsh criticism music and performing-arts festivals from those who, understandably, had (including Glastonbury, the largest been so habituated by the such event in the world).

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The success of Cullen’s projects to make purchases but also to train rests on aiming the double-barrelled them for a lifetime of consumerism (see capitalist threat of extortionate debt Langer, 2002; Zelizer, 1994; Barber, and hyper-consumerist marketing at 2007). More recent theorists, including the fetishized figure of the child. Even Lee Edelman (2004), have identified as early as the mid-19th century, Marx the way the child under capitalism, and and Engels (1848), writing in the particularly under neoliberal Communist Manifesto, derided the cynical capitalism, becomes the icon of a way in which bourgeois morality deeply heteronormative “reproductive revered the nuclear family and futurism” that is used to justify especially the innocence and purity of conservative and austere politics today (middle-class) children while, at the in the name of better tomorrow’s for same time, supporting a capitalist our children. Meanwhile, Zygmunt system that conscripted millions of Bauman (1999), among others, has proletarian children to life (and death) noted the ways that far-right and in factories or poverty (Engels, 1884). reactionary imaginations and In the mid-20th century, Walter movements congeal around real or Benjamin, among others, focused his perceived threats to the child, attention on the ways in which especially when that child is associated children’s play was already infected by with ethnic, national or religious ideals. the logic of capitalism, but also escaped Leigh Claire La Berge (2019), in and exceeded it (Benjamin, 2006). her deeply insightful book-length study While a whole range of theorists of of financialization, labour and education have noted the way that contemporary social practice (or formal schooling systems inscribe participatory) art, focuses on the way children into capitalism depending on such artists have engaged with children social and class background and in the last decades, “employing” expectation (Bourdieu, 1990). Others children in roles ranging from including Jack Zipes (2002), Henry hairdressers to financial consultants, Giroux (2001; Giroux and Searls creators of art to destroyers of art. La Giroux, 2004), and bell hooks (1994) Berge’s overarching argument here is have noted the educative and that, because children (in the “Global indoctrinating character of popular North,” at least) are legally prohibited culture in reinforcing class, race and from working for a wage (thanks to gender hierarchies. This is to say generations of working-class struggle), nothing of advertising itself, which, their employment by artists is a especially since the widespread method to reveal a broader shift in the adoption of television, targets children capitalist economy towards what she explicitly and unrelentingly, both in terms the increased order to have them “nag” their parents decommodification of labour: the

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fashion in which labour which was For our purposes here, we can once waged ceases to be remunerated, observe the play of two unpayable even though it remains subject to the debts in “Pocket Money Loans.” First, discipline of capitalism. So, for the fear and concern generated by the instance, artists themselves gimmick revolves around the notion increasingly “work for free,” or for that children, who have not yet “exposure,” but so too do many developed a fully mature neoliberal aspirants to what were once imagined economic subjectivity, will be to be “middle-class” jobs: it is common scammed into taking out loans to and understood that an un(der)paid support profligate purchases and enter internship or zero-hours contract is a adulthood with a massive if not necessary (but by no means sure) unpayable debt. Yet this begs a stepping-stone to a career in number of questions. First, arguably journalism, finance, law or academia the reason we, as a society, forbid (Cederström and Fleming, 2012; children from taking out loans in the Berardi, 2009). Indeed, it has become first place is because we (rightly) want obligatory for even aspirants to what to protect them from the predation of are imagined to be working-class jobs, the market so they might live out their even those considered menial, to tender years in relative peace. But this secure debt to afford training and high-mindedness seems not to extend credentialization, or to endure to doing much for the 30% of children un(der)paid apprenticeships (see Ross, living in poverty in the UK, a number 2014). that has increased dramatically with For La Berge, all of these are neoliberalism and austerity (Elliott, signals of a deeper shift in capitalism 2017; Cantillon et al., 2017). Indeed, in germane to financialization, and a horrendous sort of way, a small loan, towards neoliberalism as a policy and a repayable in adulthood, might actually cultural / ideological hegemon. In the facilitate children’s access to some same book, she explores the work of elements of what we conventionally artists Cassie Thornton and Thomas associate with a decent childhood. Nor Gokey who have recast debt does it address the reality that, in spite (specifically student debt) as a medium of the fact children are forbidden from of creative expression, arguing that in borrowing money from financial an era of decommodifcation of labour institutions, their childhoods are still going into and managing debt financialized both at the level of (a) the becomes a work-like activity. In family where parents are exhorted to Cullen’s Pocket Money Loans, the two go into debt to upgrade children’s come together: the hypothetical child human capital through expensive borrower works on two fronts: as artist curricular or extra-curricular and as debtor. education (see Martin, 2002) and of (b)

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the state, which is increasingly and never repay what they owe encouraged to see education, pediatric (Rupert Jones, 2017). Declining real public health and child-centred civic (inflation adjusted) wages for working- infrastructure or programming as and middle-class workers, as well as “investments” in the future workforce rising costs for housing, transportation, or tax base (see, for instance, Wietecha, fuel, food and education promise a 2016; Karoly, 1998). future where debts pile atop one As ever, the innocence and another in cascading waves (Ross, protection of the child here appears 2014). Even if one is lucky enough to precisely as a means to distract from pay down the first, the next is not far and normalize the presumed off. This is the existential condition untrustworthiness and economic that awaits the majority of children and abandonment of poor and indebted of which they are already implicitly adults. Why would it be unacceptable aware, as I have argued in my study of to use the latest advertising arsenal to children’s financialized engagement offer predatory loans to children when with the popular Pokémon brand have based our entire economy around (Haiven, 2012a). Ultimately, the figure doing so to adults, as the subprime loan of the debt-free child helps normalize debacle illustrated? Indeed, in a society the pernicious subjectivity pf the where the fate of most adults is to hopelessly debt-encumbered or spend their lives in debt, and where the entrapped adult that the child is first major adult economic experience destined to become. most children have is going into debt to Ultimately, this is the nature of pay for a university education, the the society “we” have created for our protection of children from debt is children. Put otherwise, this is the pyrrhic at best. modality of social reproduction “we” This latter point leads us to a have orchestrated, one based on and second general point about unpayable reproductive of unpayable debts. Here debt at work in this piece. While many financial debt serves to supply, co-opt debts that children of poor and middle- and pervert one of the most primordial class families will incur when they unpayable debts that has guided become adults are individually human evolution: that which payable, it is more than likely that undeniably exists between past, those children to whom Cullen’s present and future generations (see projects offers predatory loans will Dienst, 2011; Federici, 2013). While it come of age in a society that will see may be more hopeful to name these them indebted unto death (see Ross, relationships as gifts, rather than debts, 2014). Certainly, if present trends there is something about the notion of continue, a larger and larger number intergenerational bonds that speaks to of people in the UK will retire indebted the obligations and expectations of

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care, nurturance and cultivation that Payment of Greek Debt to are the sine qua non for any society, not Germany with Olives and Art only as they exist between kith and kin, but also more broadly as they are In a large gallery, overseen by a expressed by social institutions (see mezzanine in Athens’ National Graeber, 2011). The critical impact of Museum for Contemporary Art, a Cullen’s work relies on revealing to us stylish senior Latin American woman the way this fundamental set of in designer sunglasses sits back to back qualitative and generative unpayable with a middle-aged European woman debt relationships has been in a red blazer who looks and acts commodified, financialized and unnerving like German Chancellor weaponized in ways that, ultimately, Angela Merkel. They are seated in advantage the short-term reproduction swivel-chairs in front of a shallow tank and accumulation of capital. of brimming with black olives; the smell of brine saturates the space. As the performance begins, the two use their feet to pivot their stationary

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chairs as if in an awkward dance: the installed in Buenos Aries in 1983 in two women seem unable to face one celebration of the fall of the censorious another, always careening the opposite military Junta that year (“‘Parthenon direction, as if seeking and avoiding of Books’ Constructed from 100,000 one another’s eyes. Eventually Banned Books Rises at Nazi Book (awkwardly, as if unrehearsed) the two Burning Site in Germany” 2017). women stand and the Merkel look- Payment of Greek Debt to Germany with alike delivers an earnest address to the Olives and Art was also a restaging of a audiencein German, the gist of which past work, in this case Minujín’s 1985 is that she has realized that Greece’s performance (captured in a series of debt has always already been paid, photographs) Payment of the Argentine thanks to the seminal contributions Foreign Debt to Andy Warhol with Corn, The made by ancient Greek civilization to Latin American Gold, where the two the founding of the Western world. artists began seated back-to-back This performance ends with the artist against a white backdrop, surrounded in the sunglasses, Argentina’s by semi-peeled ears of corn, before celebrated pop- and performance artist Minujín hands several of the specimens Marta Minujín, gifting the Merkel to an idiosyncratically befuddled doppelganger a slimy handful of olives Warhol, who presumably accepts the from the tank to seal the deal. Cue the payment on behalf of the United States applause. (to whose Wall Street banks Argentina The work was the kick-off event owed the debt) (Larratt-Smith, 2010). for the Documenta 14 festival and its Minujín also repeated the title, Payment of Greek Debt to Germany with performance, in a way, in her 1996 Olives and Art, succinctly explains the “Solving the International Conflict conceit. At this iteration of the festival, with Art and Corn,” where she which occurs once every five years, presented the staple crop to a Margaret hitherto exclusively in Kassel, Thatcher impersonator (though why Germany, Minujín also erected a her is unclear: the Iron Lady by then massive, skeletal replica of Athens’ had been out of power for six years) famous Parthenon in Friedrichsplatz, (see Verlichak, 2010). Kassel’s main square, and invited the Minujín’s series of performances public to donate banned or censored quite explicitly encourage audiences to books to cover the exterior (see Fetter, reimagine debts and how and if they 2017; Francis, 2018). Significant ought to be repaid. Many of the debts because this was a key location where that Minujín was seeking to dissolve in the Nazis burned books some seven her 1985 piece with Andy Warhol decades earlier, Minujín’s The Parthenon stemmed from the cleptocratic and of Books (2017) was a remake of the militarist machinations of the (US- same piece, El Partenón de Libros backed) Junta, such that when

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Argentina emerged as a capitalist representing “the contemporary” in a democracy it was already on its global sense, the festival’s origins stem financial back foot, a situation that from an attempt to grapple with and would, by the 1990s lead to massive transcend the dark legacy of the Nazis, neoliberal restructuring and, in 2001, a whose antipathy to cosmopolitan, major economic crisis (see Roos, 2019). “degenerate” modern art was well In 1985, Minujín’s gesture rightly known, and who enjoyed widespread fathomed international debt as not an political and economic support from objective eternal criterion but Kassel and the broader region of Hesse something held in place by the of which it is the capital (see orchestration of power, relationships, Papadopoulos, 2018). With such a performance and ritual. Collaborating mandate and such a history to contend with Warhol, one of the US’s most with, it is no surprise that the festival is prominent (and commercially one of the global art world’s most successful) contemporary artists, significant, anticipated and (therefore) Minujín’s work questioned if and how vexed. The 2017 edition of the festival, debts so onerous as to be fiscally curated by Adam Szymczyk and an all- unpayable might be repaid otherwise, star team of international art-world in this case by symbolically offering luminaries, was no exception to this corn, a traditional staple of Latin trend, thanks to at least two unique American agriculture (though not one, historical factors. it would seem that originated in First, following criticisms of Argentina). Beyond Minujín’s previous iterations of the festival which appropriation of Latin American had tended to associate “the indigenous traditions, where gifts of contemporary” with Western Europe corn might ameliorate a conflict or pay and North America (following a tacitly a blood-debt, this work had the virtue white-supremacist and colonial logic), of both revealing and reframing debt the 2017 edition dedicated itself to as, ultimately, a matter of the “Learning from the South” and opted weaponized imagination, beyond the to, for the first time, split its activities particular quantitative figures in which between Kassel and another city: it might typically be denominated. Athens. While Greece is typically Whatever critical dimension the associated with the imagined antiquity piece may have had in 1985 was almost of “Western civilization,” this choice completely evacuated in its 2017 came in the context of the catastrophic reprisal at Documenta 14, though to paroxysms of debt-driven austerity and understand why we must first sketch its social collapse forced on the small context. Documenta has never been nation in the wake of the 2008 financial without controversy. Tasked with, in crisis, which Greek commentators some fashion, capturing and from across the political spectrum have

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likened to a form of financial and Lapavitsas, 2015). As the then-finance political colonialization by the Troika: minister Yanis Varoufakis (2018) (who the informal name given to the quit SYRIZA following the European Central Bank, the European referendum) illustrates, the message Commission and the International was clear: the social and economic life Monetary Fund (Lapavitsas, 2012; of Greece would be sacrificed in order Varoufakis, 2016). It is far from to shore up the precarious state of the insignificant that the first two of these international banking sector, notably institutions are widely understood to be Germany’s hegemonic Deutsche Bank. dramatically influenced (if not For our purposes one of the controlled) by Germany, the European most remarkable dimensions of this Union’s largest economy and a major debacle was the reports issued by the source of investment / speculation in IMF (one third of the Troika) even Greek private and public debts since before the referendum that indicated the 1990s (Roos, 2019). that, in spite of so much high-minded Documenta’s appearance in moralism insisting Greece had to Athens came three years after the answer for its profligate borrowing in historical showdown between the the 1990s and 2000s, further austerity Troika and Greece’s left-wing was almost certain to fail in its stated SYRIZA party who in 2015, following aim of creating the conditions of debt a decisive electoral victory and repayment: without significant unsuccessful negotiations to write off economic growth that could only be the debt or reduce the austerity that catalyzed through massive government was destroying the country’s social stimulus spending, the Greek economy fabric, called a national plebiscite to would weaken and weaken (see Roos, gauge if the Troika’s bailout package 2019). Beyond the very significant (and dramatic austerity agenda) should question of whether the debts Greece be accepted (Varoufakis, 2018). owed were in fact legitimate in the first Implicit though ambiguous in the place (the subject of a provisional referendum was the broader question report of a commission of international of Greece’s further participation in the experts struck by the SYRIZA European Union. The “OXI” or NO government in the lead up to the vote was decisive, but days later, in a referendum, and dissolved shortly after shocking about-face, the SYRIZA their capitulation - see (“Preliminary government ended up accepting the Report”, 2015), a deeper conundrum bailout package when faced with the emerged here: what does it mean for moralistic recalcitrance of hardliners in the Troika to insist on the repayment the Troika (notably representatives of of a debt that even they realize can Germany and other “Northern never be repaid, a debt that, in fact, European” states) (Flassbeck and

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fatally undermines the debtor’s ability This is the first factor that helps to ever repay? explain the curatorial and artistic While various national context of Documenta 14. The second stereotypes have been trotted out to is the so-called Refugee Crisis that make sense of the German and “began” in the summer of 2014 as “Northern European” self-defeating millions of people fled the ravaged war hardline approach (stereotypes that, at zones of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, least in Greece itself, recall the officious Pakistan, Libya as well as the economic viciousness of the Nazi occupation of privation and political repression of that country), a broader look at nations in northern Africa, daring European and global political extremely risky crossings over land and economy are more revealing (Elliott sea to seek asylum in Europe, in 2015). Allowing Greece to default on particular in wealthy “Northern its debts, or debt reduction, or an European” nations (see Reece Jones, easement of austerity, would, from the 2017; Woznicki, 2018). Let us set aside perspective of Germany and other the important question of how these financially powerful nations, send a “wealthy” nations derived their wealth dangerous signal to other debt- and stability, in part, from the histories encumbered states in Europe and and legacies of the same imperialism around the world (see Bello, 2013). and colonialism that led to the While Greece itself represents an instability and poverty from which the almost insignificant economic player refugees fled (a kind of debt we shall within the EU and global economy, its return to in the final section of this martyrdom was calculated to chapter). For now it is significant to demonstrate to other nations including note the fanfare, both within and Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (now beyond Germany, when, in 2015, reclassified as the “European Chancellor Angela Merkel declared periphery”) that they would receive no (somewhat deceptively) that the sympathy from the Troika or global Federal Republic would have an open- markets, and that austerity was door policy towards Syrian refugees, obligatory (Flassbeck and Lapavitsas, eventually admitting nearly one 2015). Meanwhile, beyond Europe, million (see Bergfeld, 2016). Never there was significant fear that, if mind that Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey Greece was given any quarter, it would and Egypt had accepted many times soon be demanded by nations in the this number. Never mind that the Global South who have been ensnared specification of Syrian (not Afghan or in neocolonial debt peonage for Libyan) refugees aimed to attract generations (thanks in large part to the generally highly-skilled, well-educated machinations of the IMF) (Roos, 2019; asylum, middle-class seekers who could Ndikumana and Boyce, 2011). make an important contribution of

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Germany’s economy and aging train by the Nazis, with the enthusiastic workforce (in a long tradition of support of the (proverbial and literal) German exploitation of foreign “guest grandparents of today’s well-wishers2. workers”) (Bergfeld, 2017). Never While Germany paid (and continues to mind that this arrangement eventually pay) economic reparations to Jewish would necessitate a deal between the Holocaust survivors and their families, EU and the notoriously punitive and and to the state of Israel, for the debts authoritarian regime in Turkey to germane to the world-historic crime of deny refugees access to Europe, and the Nazi Holocaust, Merkel’s would-be also the stranding of over 60-thousand world-historic gesture was arguably in refugees in the austerity-ravaged part aimed at repaying that debt on Greece (“After 16 Refugees Drown, another set of levels. It should be noted Greeks Rally Against EU-Turkey that this explanation for Merkel’s Swap Deal”, 2018). refugee policy was also widely What is significant for our propounded by Germany’s far-right as purposes here is the way that Merkel’s part of a campaign to suggest that it move was arguably calculated to in was high time for the nation to let go of some sense repay or amortize its ideologically stifling and (to their Germany’s historic and moral debts of mind) ethno-nationally “suicidal” guilt the Nazi period. It is not only that this complex (see Schwartz, 2017; for an move came shortly after Germany’s English equivalent, see Murray, 2018). ugly leadership on the question of the In any case, by Minujín’s 2017 Greek debt. It was also that, in such a performance the success of Merkel’s monumental gesture of liberal policy was widely questioned. The humanism, Germany was perhaps conflict in Syria has escalated and encouraged to imagine itself as finally unleashed one of the most terrifying liberated from the profound collective spectres yet seen: the so-called “Islamic guilt owing to the Nazi Holocaust (not State,” a monstrous manifestation of insignificantly, German speakers use fascistic vengeance cloaked in Muslim the same word—schuld—for guilt, fundamentalist garb, that not only shame and debt) (Wintour, 2016). As imposed a grotesque legal code on the Horst Bredecamp has noted, widely- territories it controlled but also broadcast and shared videos of coordinated and inspired freelance acts refugees arriving en masse at German of political violence targeting civilians train stations, greeted by thousands of in “Western” nations like Germany. In German well-wishers, almost seemed those nations, far-right and neofascist to be a magical reversal of the groups greatly profited from these apocryphal image of Jews, Roma attacks, using them to whip up people, queer people, communists and xenophobic fear, resentment and others deported to death camps by antipathy towards refugees (Crawford,

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2017). Immediately following critical failure. In the first place, even if Documenta 14, Germany’s Alternative the analogy between Argentina’s debt für Deutschland (AfD) would go on to in 1985 and Greece’s debt in 2017 enjoy 14% of the popular vote in the were accurate (it’s not), it simply does 2017 German Federal elections. not make sense that (a) Merkel would Indeed, a local Kassel AfD candidate, replace Warhol and (b) Minujín would a lawyer, took it upon himself to launch stay in her role, as opposed to, say, a a suit against the festival, nominally prominent Greek artist (…though due to its significant budgetary deficit perhaps no prominent Greek artist (incurred, in part, because of the agreed). In the second place, Minujín’s logistical challenges of splitting the half-baked concept had much more to festival between two cities) (Neuendorf, say as a symptom of the international 2017). The lawsuit was a key example art world’s ill-informed and of the kind of right-wing populist condescending pity towards Greece political resentiment that has made the than it did about the crisis of austerity AfD and similar parties so successful: (see Papadopoulos, 2018). This Documenta was framed (in ways eerily condescension and ignorance was well reminiscent of the Nazi’s popular represented in a few dimensions of the castigation of “degenerate art”) as the piece. The first is that, while in appropriation of hard-working Merkel’s speech and later interviews Germans’ tax dollars as a give-away by Minujín waxed eloquent about the liberal “elites” to haughty unpayable debt that “Western cosmopolitan internationals for civilization” owes to ancient Greek inaccessible and insulting “art” culture, within Greece practically the (Müser, 2017). In this context, only parties that use this hyper- Minujín’s over-budget, aesthetically nationalist, atavistic rhetoric are far- awkward skeletal Parthenon of Books in right actors, notably the murderous Kassel’s main square was lambasted by neo-fascist Golden Dawn party (see the AfD and their allies in the right- Dalakoglou, 2013; Koronaiou et al., wing German press as a particular 2015). Second, while olives are indeed egregious example of the art world’s a key and celebrated part of Greek conspiracy to both rob and mock the cuisine and a notable (though not volk (“Documenta 14 Artists Pen particularly lucrative) export, during Second Open Letter Defending the crisis Greece was often saddled in Exhibition”, 2017). the international arena with the These contextual factors help accusation of a kind of cultural and explain why Minujín’s re-heated economic backwardness tied to performance of “Payment of Greek racialized myths about a Southern Debt to Germany with Olives and Art” culture of leisure emblematized by in Athens was such an artistic and olives and wine (Mylonas, 2018).

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Apparently blithely ignorant of these it can call together some sort of and other resonances and common political-economic agency or contradictions, Minujín’s ill-informed collectivity. “We” (the international art attempt to unsummon Greece’s debt world) all get the joke, but no one and create a cathartic spectacle could wants to do anything about it, because rightfully be said to have been an the joke is on us: we are the expression of a kind of patronizing beneficiaries of that same system, as hubris that critics charge characterized represented by the (professionally the festival’s Athens experience as a ambivalent) institution of Documenta. whole. To be clear, I do not think Space does not permit a full Documenta’s value is exhausted by explication of all the dimensions of this these complicities and contradictions: hubris or its origins and implications, there were many other fine works at but it does help us to understand a few the festival, and some of them things about the question of unpayable addressed the political-economic debts. Minujín’s obvious gambit is that moment of unpayable debts with she can excavate an unpayable cultural critical sophistication and aesthetic debt of Europe to Greece which acuity. However, Minujín’s piece, “trumps” the (also unpayable) financial which was also the keynote opening debt owed by contemporary Greece to performance of the festival’s presence “Europe” (mostly to Germany, its in Athens, reveals that even work that banks and their global clients). In the seeks to make some of the dimensions first place, this maneuver reifies not of an unpayable debt visible can, in the only the contemporary financial debt end, reinforce or reinscribe the (the piece declares it repaid, not relationships and symbolic illegitimate in the first place), but also infrastructures that allowed for the the categories of “Greece” and unpayable debt in the first place. If we “Europe” that are at the core of the wish to find art that can help us financialized imaginary of nation- envision a different approach, we must states that is arguably the source of the look elsewhere. problem in the first place. There is, of course, an element of critical truth to the idea that a debt to culture, philosophy and art ought to be more important than mere money, especially when that money is itself the hallucination of unanswerable financial institutions or a weapon of geopolitics. But this point is pedestrian and unactionable except to the extent

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Gone Indian and singing) from a large sound- system. Eventually, the van pulled up It was after midnight and a on the curb at the headquarters to the million people, many of them Royal Bank of Canada, one of the inebriated, ramble through downtown world’s largest financial institutions Toronto’s financial district on a warm whose imposing two-tower edifice is September night (J. Fisher and literally made of gold infused into its Drobnick, 2012). As they make their glistening sheet-glass siding. A crowd way between the charismatic art gathers, most of them non-Indigenous, installations of the 2009 edition of the to watch Gone Indian, a performance by city’s Nuit Blanche all-night public arts Rebecca Belmore, perhaps Canada’s festival, some encountered a best known and most celebrated dilapidated and muddy burgundy van, Indigenous performance artists a set of deer antlers affixed to its hood, (Nagam, 2011). The title is a sly pun: its roof covered in an embroidered the Indian is gone from these lands, buckskin rug with a couple of old eliminated to make room for the armchairs secured on top, driving bustling financial district and larger slowly through the streets, blaring city; but “going Indian” was also a Indigenous powwow music (drumming phrase from that same Canadian

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history to describe European settlers periphery of the performance space who developed what were perceived to and later cut them open with a knife, be unhealthy attachments to the place spilling the coins onto the sidewalk and its people, being adopted into before tying the torn red fabrics to her Indigenous communities (a crime — ankle. Meanwhile, celebrated Cree desertion — that, in Canada’s early actor and dancer Michael Greyeyes, colonial days, was punishable by slow dressed in full dance regalia, and painful death) or otherwise performed a series of choreographed abandoning what the British called modern dance routines, first to an “civility” for “savage” ways (see Van Indigenous hip-hop track, next to a Kirk, 1983). recording of pow-wow drumming and

Belmore’s performance was singing. While Greyeyes’ movements layered and complex, blending referenced pow-wow dancing, they Anishinaabe, Cree, and settler were original contemporary symbolism. Near the outset, Belmore, compositions, often exhibiting jerky, barefoot and wearing feather-adorned halting motions as if his body were at army-green coveralls and a black times possessed and / or constrained toque, placed several red cloth bags by unseen, unfriendly forces. The full of Canadian pennies at the whole performance was quietly

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overseen and occasionally markets and the joint-stock, limited photographed by a silent Indigenous liability corporation had their origins man conspicuously wearing dress in Amsterdam and London in the pants, a white collared shirt, a black financing of colonial ventures, settler- tie, a black fringed buckskin jacket, colonies and the slave trade (Haiven, and sunglasses (despite it being 2017). Authors including Ian Baucom nighttime). As the performance (2005), Anita Rupprecht (2016) and unfolded, Belmore, on her knees, used Zenia Kich and Justin Leroy (2015) what appeared to be a heavy have demonstrated that the origins of traditional stone mortar and pestle to modern insurance laws and practices attempt to grind the pennies as one cannot be separated from the might to corn or medicines to produce transformation of enslaved African an edible or healing substance. The human beings into speculative performance ended with Greyeyes property. And Brenna Bhandar (2018), drifting, as if in slow-motion, through Eileen Moreton Robinson (2015), the space and Belmore giving up on Rachel O’Reilly (2018), and Cheryl her task. The pennies remained Harris (1993) have all argued that the scatted on the ground and the notion that land could become “real company drove away in the van. estate” to be speculated upon and This piece was intentionally exchanged had its roots in the colonial ambiguous in part because, to my transformation of territory into private mind, it attempted to haunt the property. colonial imagination precisely at the In Belmore’s few public fraught intersection where, drawing on comments about Gone Indian she has the work of Sherene Razack (2002), stressed that, in transporting a pow- space meets place in a colonial settler wow into the financial district, she is state: in this case the site where attempting to create a spectacle not so Indigenous land has been turned into a much of remembrance of the past but financial zone of speculation. This a haunting image for the attendees, the choice of location is by no means vast majority of whom are urban coincidental. As I have elaborated settlers (see Haiven, 2012b). Before this elsewhere, the theft of lands from space was a financialized place, the Indigenous people, and the elimination headquarters of Canada’s largest bank, of Indigenous presence on those lands, it was something, or somewhere, else. was always a financialized affair. All But the ceremony Belmore three key dimensions of the so-called choreographed does not afford the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and viewer the satisfaction of the real estate) were essentially born in the anthropological gaze so germane to crucible of European imperialism and settler colonies where, as Patrick Wolfe (settler-)colonialism: Both stock (2006) notes, the state attempts to

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continue its genocidal elimination of and the United Nations have Indigenous presence on the land condemned Canadian and Canadian- precisely by adopting, accommodating funded mining corporations for and appropriating it’s chosen versions environmental and human rights of Indigenous “culture.” “We,” the abuses both within Canada and audience, arrive expecting to be around the world, especially as they entertained; we leave haunted by have affected (and, indeed, targeted) ghosts that were always already hidden Indigenous people and Indigenous in plain sight (see A. F. Gordon, 2008). lands (T. Gordon and Webber, 2016; The choice of the RBC Veltmeyer and Petras, 2014). headquarters is quite specific. As Meanwhile, in Canada, settler Canada’s largest bank not only does it colonialism itself has taken on a inherit the legacies of financialized financialized dimension. Since the 19th settler-colonialism, which for instance century, the Canadian government has financed the fur-trade on which the imposed on Indigenous communities a nation was built, or the expansion of form of poisoned “self-governance” the railway across the nation which led mandated through the Indian Act, a to the mass displacement of multiple set of laws for the governance of Indigenous peoples (see Haiven, 2017). Indigenous life that, at one time, RBC is also a key participant in the included restrictions on Indigenous continued colonization of the land people’s right to leave reservations today: The bulk of the savings and without a pass authorized by a (white) investments it manages are routed Indian Agent, their right to hunt and through firms on Canada’s nearby fish, their right to practice Indigenous TSX stock exchange where by some spirituality and ceremonies, their right estimates 60% of global mining to organize politically, their right to industry venture financing is generated hire lawyers, their right to use modern (see Deneault and Sacher, 2012; T. farming implements and their right to Gordon and Webber, 2016). Indeed, speak their langauges (see Manuel and Canada has repeatedly named the Derrickson, 2015). This Act also extractive industry, both at home and permitted the abduction of Indigenous abroad, as one of its key strategic children from their families to be economic interests (“Mining Capital: placed in church-run Residential How Canada Has Transformed Its Schools, where they were severely Resource Endowment into a Global punished for any behaviours deemed Competitive Advantage”, 2013). This “savage” (eg. speaking their language) in spite of the fact that numerous and where they were subject to the international non-governmental horrific predations and abuses of the organizations, including Human clergy and staff, all of which is a matter Rights Watch, Amnesty International of public record and discussion thanks

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to a landmark legal case by survivors indicators that characterize life on that resulted in a national Truth and reserve is transferred from the Federal Reconciliation Commission that was government’s inaction and caustic ongoing during Belmore’s paternalism towards the failure of performance and released its final markets in those spaces (see landmark report in 2015 (“Honouring Altamirano-Jiménez, 2013; the Truth, Reconciling the Futre: Final Sommerville, 2018). Numerous Report”, 2015). successive Canadian governments Today, the administration of have sought to dissolve Indigenous settler-colonialism in Canada stresses collective title to lands and transform Indigenous self-governance, but the them into individual fee-simple top-down colonial framework still holdings, the hope being that the persists: as Shiri Pasternak (2015, 2016) introduction of private property will has demonstrated, the Canadian inspire entrepreneurialism, allow government exerts profound and Indigenous people on reservations to corrosive disciplinary pressure on borrow against their holdings, relocate Indigenous governments through to take advantage of labour markets financialized means. In the first place, elsewhere and, ultimately, lead them to the Canadian government holds the become proper capitalist subjects (see purse-strings for funds that support Coulthard, 2014). Needless to say, this nearly all services on Indigenous agenda has been strenuously rejected reservations and uses a series of by many Indigenous nations who insist laborious and disciplinary accounting that their communal, non- and reporting mechanisms to constrain commodified relationship to a land- and delimit Indigenous communities’ base is at the heart of their existence as spending. Meanwhile, it holds out the a people. For this reason, Wolfe (2006) threat of auditing and forced third- and others including Glen Coulthard party management to dissuade those (2014) and Audra Simpson (2014) have governments from taking actions that noted that such market-oriented might jeopardise the colonial settler privatization schemes are part of a long state’s interests, notably blocking or genocidal tradition of seeking to intervening in attempts to locate “eliminate” Indigenous people. extractive industries (eg. mines) or All these dimensions factor into infrastructure (eg. pipelines) on Belmore’s performance. Settler Indigenous lands. Meanwhile, the colonialism has advanced by same neoliberal governments have leveraging financialized mechanisms sought to fix the “Indian Problem” to transform land into property by through financialized means. eliminating Indigenous presence. Her Responsibility for the endemic poverty temporary reclaiming of the bank’s and horrendous health and social space aims, in part, to reveal the

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imaginary and imaginative powers at thrive or succeed within a white- work by transforming a financialized supremacist economic system, even space back into an Indigenous place. It (especially) if that system now (self- is not insignificant that Belmore here servingly) declares itself a colour-blind opts to work with pennies as well, an capitalist meritocracy. Belmore and almost worthless unit of Canadian Greyeyes attempt to innovate currency that the nation ceased to mint Indigenous practices within a field of in 2012. Her attempts to crush or coins, in the shadow of the bank, pulverize this ubiquitous fetish object, surrounded by settler onlookers; their stands in, perhaps, for Indigenous inability to succeed or thrive then attempts to grapple with the poisonous becomes evidence of an unspoken and financialized spirituality or belief- unspeakable debt that settler- system of settler-colonialism, which in colonialism imposes on Indigenous the end is reducible only to the peoples and communities. As with the pathological logic of capital itself: case of settler colonial schemes to accumulation at all costs. “civilize” Indigenous people through If so, two, or perhaps three the financialization of their lands, the unpayable debts are at work in this gift is poisoned (see Haiven, 2017). piece. In the first place, Belmore’s Yet at the same time this failure to crush the coins, and performance might also be said to seek Greyeye’s ambivalent, fractured to awaken the audience’s sensibility to dance, may be read as resonant with the unpayable debts owed by settler- the way in which financialized settler colonialism itself. With 13.5 million colonialism, past and present, has clients in a nation of 36 million, it is sought to subsume or subscribe highly probable that the plurality of Indigenous people in a system that spectators at Belmore’s performance perpetually thwarts their thriving. As were invested in RBC; in any case in Paula Chakravartty and Denise this regard all of Canada’s five Ferrera da Silva (2012) illustrate, the hegemonic banks are equivalent: contemporary global financial order is settler colonial capitalist citizenship one that is not only built on legacies of requires one be invested, one way or racism and colonialism, but one that, another, in both the symbolic and the because of that, creates racialized real perpetuation of the financialized financial subjects doomed to a kind of seizure and destruction of Indigenous perpetual failure that is nonetheless lands via one’s savings, investments, profitable for others. In their reading, pensions and other financial activity this financialized system places non- (see Deneault and Sacher, 2012). white people in a state of perpetual, Further, the enjoyment of the built unpayable debt, a debt incurred as a environment and of the rights of subject who was never intended to citizenship anywhere in Canada, and

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certainly in its financial capital such debts might be repaid. As Toronto, depends on a long history Coulthard (2014) has noted, in the and legacy of financialized seizure of name of “reconciliation” the Canadian land and elimination of Indigenous government has made billions of presence (Bhandar, 2018). Hence both dollars of new funding available in a the space of the bank building and the kind of histrionic and hypocritical material of the coins might be intended generosity: the money is, after all, to awaken an awareness in the derived ultimately from land and audience that they, too, are the resources stolen from Indigenous product and the reproducers of a people in the first place (Manuel and financialized form of settler Derrickson, 2015). Indeed, even in colonialism, and that this system spite of this “generosity,” multiple implies an almost sublimely huge levels of Canadian state administration moral and also economic debt. have been found guilty in court of For instance, the reparation systematically underfunding settlement for the survivors of the Indigenous communities and people Residential Schools alone (the largest (especially children) relative to non- for a class action suit in Canadian Indigenous Canadians (see Cossette, history, with upwards of 34,000 2017). By the same token, the colonial claimants) amounted to over $3-billion settler state has strongly encouraged CAD (Galloway, 2016); were it to be (and at times blackmailed) Indigenous seriously entertained (it is not), the governments to accept profit-sharing monetary compensation and agreements with extractive restitution for historical harms, corporations for the (ab)use of their attempted genocide and the systematic lands, even though the environmental theft of Indigenous land would quite and social impacts are ultimately probably amount to a sum sufficient to destructive to those communities bankrupt this G8 Nation. (Pasternak, 2017). For these reasons, Elsewhere I have mused on the an increasing number of Indigenous political utility of settlers in Canada nations and communities are resisting embracing this imminent bankruptcy or rejecting monetary compensation or as a methodology by which to imagine offers and, instead insisting on their a world beyond both financialization sovereign rights to control access and and settler-colonialism, which I think is use of their territories, a sovereignty urgently necessary (Haiven, 2017). For (which should not be mistaken for a now I simply want to conclude by replica of the Westphalian European stressing that at stake in Belmore’s model) they are willing to defend summoning of the spectres of through civil disobedience, blockades unpayable debts is the question of in and, even, armed resistance what currency, or through what terms,

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(Coulthard, 2014; A. J. Barker, 2015; J. monetized terms precisely to help mask Barker, 2017). its origins in social violence and to If this trend continues the settler individualize and pathologize the colonial state of Canada will soon find debtor to prevent them from creating itself unable to pay its debts for bonds of solidarity within and beyond colonialism with its own minted their communities, with those likewise currency: the currency itself is a key encumbered. Meanwhile, the debt part of the system that exacts the owed by the systems and structures of violence that continues to incur the financialized power are rendered debt. If that is the case, amortizing that qualitative and moral at best, debt will need to take place by other irrelevant at worst, in any case means, primarily through the cessation unactionable. of the economic and social violence. But like an unquiet ghost, the But this is arguably ontologically deeper debt haunts: these profound impossible within the current order: unpaid, indeed ontological debts express the state and the form of financialized, themselves as contradictions and settler colonial capitalism with which it cataracts in the socio-economic and is entangled cannot endure a terminal political fabric. Often, able to neither challenge to the twinned legal / admit nor assuage the debt, those political / economic logics of private indebted systems take revenge in the property and territorial state form of punitive moralism or wanton sovereignty that such a cessation would cruelty: the hypocritical fetishization of implicitly demand. Repayment of the the figure of the debt-free child; the debt would quite literally both imply passion play that blames Greek debt and require a revolution. (and German wealth) on allegedly national cultural characteristics, but Conclusion nonetheless abandons a whole population to penury; the poisoned If the above artworks have benevolence of Canadian settler taught us anything it is that systems colonialism. Because ultimately these and structures of financialized power relationships are based on the fabricate and enforce unpayable debts exploitation and oppression germane on those people and communities to the contradictions of capitalist whom they subordinate precisely in accumulation in a financialized world, order to cover over the unpayable they breed resentment and are riven debts they themselves owe to the with crises which, as they deepen, subordinated. As David Graeber require that the dominant systems (2011) argues, under financialization, unleash ever more structural and the unpayable debt of the subjugated is systemic violence. made to appear in quantitative,

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One might assess these and rebellion within and between those other artworks on the basis of how well who are both abject debtor and secret they can reveal these underlying creditor to an unchosen, destructive dynamics. But more importantly, one system. The latter is the crucial work of might assess them to the extent they the radical imagination within, against make visible, even for a moment, the and beyond financialization. potentials for solidarity, refusal and

1 2 https://www.socialdifference.columbia.edu/ Bredekamp made this point during a presentation as projects-/unpayable-debt-capital-violence-and-the- part of the Uncertain States exhibition at the new-global-economy Academie der Kunst in Berlin in 2017, though I have not been able to locate it in print.

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