Complex Financial Instruments

Complex Financial Instruments uses musical metaphors to explore the relationship between affect and the economy through a performance-installation exhibition. A collaboration between artist G Douglas Barrett and economic theorist Leigh Claire La Berge, Complex Financial Instruments turns the gallery space into a treatment center for visitors with financial problems.

In our financialized era of debt, precarity, unemployment, and uncertainty, how can one confront forms of economic violence that seem to resist traditional modes of support? Complex Financial Instruments merges the disciplines of psychotherapy, financial advice, and music to address the problem of creating meaning in an economy based on the creation of money.

Participants sign up for therapy sessions presented over the course of four days (June 10–13) in Stuttgart’s Projektraum LOTTE. A visitor arrives at the gallery, greets her new therapist, and begins a 50-minute session of financial therapy. As this process unfolds, an interpretation is provided by a »complex« pairing of musical performers.

Musicians include Seth Josel, Lina Lapelytė, Die Nerven (Max Rieger, Julian Knoth), Marie Schmit, Richard Spaeth, Sabrina Schray (Perigon), Kamala (Débora Vilchez), Constanze Zacharias and Harry Delgas. 

On Saturday, June 12, 2016 at 8 pm, Leigh Claire La Berge will talk about How Finance Became Complex and Caroline Woolard about Solidarity Art Economies.

Sign up for a 50-minute session of financial therapy between 4 and 8pm, June 10–13, 2016: kohlmann@projektraum-lotte.de.