For more than a decade, Femke Herregraven has been investigating which material base, geographies, and value systems are carved out by financial technologies and infrastructures. Focusing on the effects of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and individual lives, her research is the basis for the conception of speculative characters, stories, objects, sculptures, sound, and mixed-media installations. Her interest in finance stems from the fact that finance and art started operating in similar ways in the late 1960s/early 1970s. During that time, the dematerialisation of money, gradually untethered to gold reserves, coincided with the dematerialisation of the art object, through new artistic practices of conceptual art. The return of language in her work comes from the premise that language itself is increasingly shaped by the dynamics of capital and technology rather than by the dynamics of imagination.
In a financialised world, language is increasingly being defined by its economic exchangeability. How to break away from the increasingly informational and transactional use of language under the widespread and dominant systems of finance? How can breathing, vocalisation, and noise resist the grammar of capitalism and break its monopoly on the future? By staging a live vocalisation learning experiment, the exhibition DIALECT explores strategies for reactivation of the imaginative force of language against the claim that finance has on the future through the semantics of capital.
Femke Herregraven transforms RADIUS into a site for language re-signification that is reciprocally informed by the local ecology in which it exists, hence vocalising its own dialect. Empowering semiotic agency against an increasingly unstable future, DIALECT emphasises the ecological embeddedness of language and mobilises its polyphonic potential to be able to wish for and shape futures beyond capitalism.
Living in a financialised world entails the adoption of fictitious capital as the primary means of explaining and imagining society. In its pursuit of never-ending growth, and in acknowledging the finitude of materials from which profit can be extracted, capitalism requires widespread financial techniques and technologies that create value out of arbitrary fictions. Finance is speculative by nature, as it is structured around predictions on how valuable something will be in the future. It places bets on how a premise will or will not be realised and it projects an arbitrary value based on that likeliness. Hence, finance strives to fulfill its own prophecies, competing to predict the future which, by the law of its own models, is unpredictable.
In order to sustain its prophetic capacity, finance necessitates risk. Femke Herregraven has long been exploring risk in finance, especially in relation to catastrophe bonds, a financial instrument that is designed to raise money for companies in the insurance industry in the event of a natural disaster.
Risk, or the level of uncertainty regarding the possibility of something happening in the future, ensures that there is always someone benefitting from it and someone losing to it. Will this country’s GDP soar or plummet? Will this ecological catastrophe happen, and what insured goods will it ravage? How lucrative will real estate be in that country should it lose the war? In the post-modern, hyper-capitalist stage of the world, the production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the production of risks. In the establishment of risk as a necessary condition for finance to operate, the economy becomes self-referential and independent to the satisfaction of human needs. Consequently, with the economic exploitation of the risks it sets free, finance produces the hazards and the political potential of what Ulrich Beck calls the risk society.
Femke Herregraven, Diving Reflex (Because We Learned Not To Drown We Can Sing), 2019,Prix de Rome/Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Through language, both in its alphabetical and numerical manifestations, finance is able to abstract the world and make a claim on its future. It is mostly spoken in “standard” English, and it is full of untranslatable terms which designate complex processes that are incomprehensible to those outside the financial field. Just as a language describes the world sympathetically to the worldview where it originates, the kind of language that finance produces is characterised by opacity, convolution, and exclusion. As philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi puts it, “in the age of capitalism, the economy has taken the place of universal grammar traversing the different levels of human activity; language, too, is defined and limited by its economic exchange”.When the arbitrary values of finance become the organising principle of the relationship between humans and nature, its language cannot fully reflect the complexity of the biophysical metabolic processes between them, which lie at the core of language production.
As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi further explains, “the future is now being written by the algorithmic chain inscribed in techno-linguistic automatisms. Prescriptions, prophecies, and injunctions are ways of inscribing the future in language, and, more pointedly, of actually producing the future by means of language. Like prescriptions, prophecies, and injunctions, code has the power to prescribe the future, by formatting linguistic relations and the pragmatic development of algorithmic signs. Financial code, for instance, triggers a series of linguistic automatisms which perform social activity, consumption patterns, and lifestyles” (Berardi, 28). DIALECT is a proposal to understand and make language otherwise as a way of combatting the semantic and semiotic power of finance. Instead of rejecting the tools that allow finance to do that, Femke Herregraven investigates how to use them differently, so as to develop an ecological way of thinking and working with technology. Digital code does not exist outside the world, but it emerges intrinsically from it. To be alive is to be engrained in biological, social, and technological ecosystems: biorhythm and algorithm are not opposites, but the two sides of the same coin.
Following the premise that we participate in one another’s existence, influencing each other and being influenced in turn, ecologist and philosopher David Abram claimed that “prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists.”
By activating a reciprocal linguistic paradigm in RADIUS within an ecology of humans, nonhumans, and technology, Femke Herregraven reveals a dialect from which to empower our agency in claiming the future from the unjust and unsustainable grip of financial capitalism.
Femke Herregraven, The Murmur of the Dying, 2023, film still.
Gary Zhexi Zhang, ‘Catastrophe Time!’ in Catastrophe Time!, ed. Gary Zhexi Zhang (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2023), p. 27.
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Catastrophe bonds, also known as ‘cat bonds’, were created in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, upon the realisation that increasingly destructive catastrophes could entail a scale of damage that even reinsurers––companies that insure risks of other insurance companies––would not be able to cover. Arguably, cat bonds are exemplary of how finance seeks to profit from the increasing unpredictability of the weather due to climate change.
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Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, (London: Sage, 1992), p. 23.
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Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Breathing. Chaos and Poetry (South Pasadena: Semiotext(e), 2018), p. 32.
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Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 24.
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David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (Penguin Random House: New York, 2018 (1996), p. 57.
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Curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, assisted by Sergi Pera Rusca.
This exhibition marks the last chapter of Femke Herregraven's Creator Doctus trajectory at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Instituut.
The exhibition FEMKE HERREGRAVEN: DIALECT is made possible with additional support from FONDS21, the Creative Industries Fund NL, and the Mondriaan Fund.
The RADIUS 2024 THE LIMITS TO GROWTH year-programme, of which this exhibition is a part, is made possible with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the Municipality of Delft, the Gieskes-Strijbis Fonds, Stichting Zabawas, the Van der Mandele Stichting, and the Mr. August Fentener van Vlissingen Fonds. We thank them all kindly for their support!
When the arbitrary values of finance become the organising principle of the relationship between humans and nature, its language cannot fully reflect the complexity of the biophysical metabolic processes between them, which lie at the core of language production.
By activating a reciprocal linguistic paradigm in RADIUS within an ecology of humans, nonhumans, and technology, Femke Herregraven reveals a dialect from which to empower our agency in claiming the future from the unjust and unsustainable grip of financial capitalism.
