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 & 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.