‘It is not without reason that our financial elites have been called a priesthood. Donning ceremonial garb, speaking an arcane language, wielding mysterious inscriptions, they can with a mere word or a mere stroke of a pen, cause fortunes and nations to rise and fall’ (Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein)
To shortcut back to the Present in Public intervention in Liverpool, it evolved into this project, Burning the Books. The other artists interventions and their processes, with which this project is interconnected (thankyou to all of them and their generous contribution to my own process!) are very much worth checking out and are detailed here.
I spent that November day on the streets of the Liverpool One, approaching members of the public as a kind of confessor-cum-scribe, in a long black velvet coat – large sackcloth book in-hand and ‘collected debts’ – financial, emotional and spiritual -from whoever would give them to me.
This role evolved through reading Margaret Atwood’s consideration in Payback of the ancient concept that ‘there is an underlying balancing principle in the universe, according to which we should act’ and her journey into the mythologies of the afterlife to meet the figures there whose role it was to restore ancient balances. In particular in ancient Egypt, ‘Thoth, moon-god ..the god of time…the god of measurements and numbers and astronomy and engineering skills, and …a supernatural scribe or clerk’ and in Christianity ‘Angel Gabriel..the ‘recording angel’, the one credited with keeping God’s ledger book up to date’ . There is also a reference in my role to my pre-Islamic Iranian roots which I will go into later.
(Having just googled this to get the url I notice there was a documentary released last year inspired by that book. And here is Atwood’s Payback lecture I mentioned before on Youtube)
Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon was actually the perfect place to start this project – the stereotype of scousers being up a good chat about anything WAS true for me that day!.
I learnt within half an hour to preface my approach to people with ‘I’m not asking you for money and I’m not part of any religious organisation’. Neither did I say I was an artist or tell my own story unless pressed. This often meant a more authentic conversation as many people seemed more at ease knowing what my agenda was, though some didn’t care, they were just disarmed by the idea. My favourite line to use became that I was performing a free public service for one day only which they were invited to make use of.
Each person who would talk to me was invited to – anonymously – gift me information to add to the book, by telling me directly of a debt they owed or were owed, to whom and whether they were or would ever be ready or able to pay it back / forgive it. I then scribed this information into the book. In almost every case they opted to have their contribution recited publicly before burning.
In total I collected £3,285,103, 870.00 in unpaid debt that day, and an extraordinarily diverse range of personal debts and their stories – from small amounts of money owed to councils, credit card companies, unexpressed love and apologies owed between couples and to deceased spouses, to over £3 billion pounds in taxes owed by Philip Green submitted by Occupy Liverpool protestors outside Top Shop (I think it’s ok to disclose this don’t you) to souls owed to Jesus by some of those street Christians I mentioned in my earlier recounting of my research exercise.
At the end of the day, as it got dark, we staged a ceremony in the courtyard of the Bluecoat, where I read out a short address on the balance of debt and credit, followed by a listing of the contents of the book, inviting the audience to collaborate in a process of playful absolution and ending in the physical torching of the book and the imaginary annihilation of everything owed.
The recital and burning ceremony was filmed by the curator Tim and can be viewed here on youtube.
