Speculative Economies
Event Series
April-May 2025
As our collective au JUS is facing financial burnout, we would like to invite you – our neighbors, our guests, our friends, our patrons, our followers, our tax advisors, our situationships, our competitors – into an elaborate conversation around cash, credit, capital, and anxiety.
Speculative Economies is a proposal for an artistic game salon that brings together perspectives that deal speculatively with money, processes of financialization and economy of anxiety. In consideration of capitalism’s most prominent source of crises – fictitious capital – au JUS is working on a 2-month-long trajectory that will look at MONEY as a collectively agreed fiction.
In terms of the history of ideas, art and money have a complex relationship. Speculative Economies would like to address this systemic complexity centering on speculation as a modus operandi found both in art and in finance. By looking at the entanglement of contemporary art and contemporary capital, one being the creative, open-ended, imaginary practice we know, the other a closed, self-reproducing, masturbatory and self-expanding, risk-oriented logic, we observe that both were merged ideologically in different concepts over time (creative industries, art as asset class, etc…). To explore the terminology of speculation in this complex, we propose to both enact and theorize by using games, participatory performance formats and LARP (Live-Action-Role-Play) as medium.
In this context, au JUS will host two artists and one artistic duo in residence, accompanied by a series of games, discussions, performances, somatic exercises, collective readings as well as a pirate cinema and a pirate library. Artists as well as economists will be conjointly invited to ponder on revolutionary politics, radical economies and post-capitalist scenarios. A.o. with Wassim Alsindi (0xSalon), Max Haiven (Radical Imagination), Common Wallet, Kitoki (House of Juice), Joana B Polge, Céline Estenne and many more.
This is not a scam. Come join this family therapy session.
In terms of the history of ideas, art and money have a complex relationship. Speculative Economies would like to address this systemic complexity centering on speculation as a modus operandi found both in art and in finance. By looking at the entanglement of contemporary art and contemporary capital, one being the creative, open-ended, imaginary practice we know, the other a closed, self-reproducing, masturbatory and self-expanding, risk-oriented logic, we observe that both were merged ideologically in different concepts over time (creative industries, art as asset class, etc…). To explore the terminology of speculation in this complex, we propose to both enact and theorize by using games, participatory performance formats and LARP (Live-Action-Role-Play) as medium.
In this context, au JUS will host two artists and one artistic duo in residence, accompanied by a series of games, discussions, performances, somatic exercises, collective readings as well as a pirate cinema and a pirate library. Artists as well as economists will be conjointly invited to ponder on revolutionary politics, radical economies and post-capitalist scenarios. A.o. with Wassim Alsindi (0xSalon), Max Haiven (Radical Imagination), Common Wallet, Kitoki (House of Juice), Joana B Polge, Céline Estenne and many more.
This is not a scam. Come join this family therapy session.
Speculative Economies is made possible with kind support of the VGC-kunstensubsidie.
Ongoing: The SE Pirate Library
Saturday May 31th, 3 - 6 pm
Reading Group SESSION 1: Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital by Marina Vishmidt
Tuesday, May 27th | 7-9pm
Sunday, May 25th | 4-7pm
Public Sharing of resident Asya Volodina
Tuesday, May 20th | 2-6pm
Inventory of the Network: Brussels Artist-Run Website Pre-Launch
Sunday, May 18th | 2-6:00 pm
Common Wallet Workshop + summer BBQ
Sunday, May 11th | 1 - 5:30 pm
Chit, Chat, Fund: A Participatory Experiment in Money & Trust
by Kaitlyn D. Hamilton (TUO TUO) and Vishnu Vardhani Rajan
Tuesday, Apr 29th 6 pm:
Game-Making-Workshop by Max Haiven
8-9:30 pm:
FAU0X SALON play session by Wassim Alsindi
Monday, Apr 28th 6:30 pm
Gamification, Financialization, Fascism and the Endless Crusade
Conversation with Max Haiven und Wassim Alsindi
8 pm:
Billionaires and Guillotines
Game session with Max Haiven
Thursday, Apr 24th, 6:30pm
From Feminist Finance Zine to Decentralized Currencies
Conversation with Inte Gloerich
Thursday, Apr 17th, 5 pm
House of Juice
by kitoki.io / Role-Play-Workshop with Stef Meul
Sunday, Apr 13th, 4-8 pm Vernissage: Wassim Alsindi in Residence
- The Money Game with Maru & Nick
- Meme Economies with Wassim Alsindi
- Pirate Library activation with Wassim Alsindi