I got very excited to discover the other week that the seminal book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth – written by and based on a lecture by writer Margaret Atwood – which was my initial reading companion when I was developing the original Burning the Books intervention in 2011 through Giving into Gift, has been made into a documentary film by director Jennifer Bachwal, which came out last year.
Here is the trailer, it was released in the US and Canada, (it’s available through the NFB) I am not sure when it comes out here. It’s poetic and powerful and features Atwood herself, intertwined with story strands around different aspects of debt in its many forms. Atwood was the one who opened up my thinking around debt as a metaphor and I am very grateful to her (or am I indebted?).
The stories – which are beautifully shot and the encounters sensitively and non-judgmentally handled – range from modern slavery in the tomato fields of Florida, criminal debt both within institutions (a state penitentiary in Pennsylvania) and within communities (blood debts in Northern Albania) to ecological debt on the oilfields of the Gulf coast and even an interview with Conrad Black, everyone’s favourite financial villain. It’s true to Atwood’s consideration of debt as a mental construct, and an opportunity for philosophical consideration of one’s own relationship to society, self and other, as mediated through debt in the form of ‘a social interaction – between two parties’.
I am aware the synchronicity of material like this coming out at this time, alongside all the other material mentioned before on this blog (Eisenstein,Graeber etc.). I don’t feel alone in trying to explore this mountain of a subject – in the minds of so many at the moment – with my humble teaspoon! Many people here are still not aware of extraordinary collective social actions like Strike Debt or the Rolling Jubilee initiative,. Most of this is coming out of the U.S (or Canada), I think they are ahead of us on the timeline because of the earlier impact of the financial crisis and elements like medical debt and student debt (which will begin to hit in the same way here soon). Also, I wonder is there something in the American psyche which is more at ease with public self disclosure /the confessional, or just angry/ desperate enough to have the courage to breaking the taboo of revealing personal financial and social fragility within the context of political action?
This project – rooted in the framework of a live art /work – references these, (though it was devised the year before they happened) but is different in a number of ways and tones. One of the main differences is that it is anonymous to participate in and this is vital to its hoped -for success. We are in the UK, exploring a subject that almost everyone finds it hard to go public about, so confidentiality is crucial. However I hope that there can still be a public dialogue around it that does open up notions of debt beyond the realm of the collective financial panic that a lot of us are in.
From my initial dialogues with some of the people who have contributed the first entries, it seems that just being asked the question around what they might owe or be owed – and what this might mean beyond the recounting of a figure, a number – and then having to articulate this and commit it to paper, created something new, a fresh consideration on what is perceived to be a deadening subject.
I’m aware that we are about to go live online with this project later this week and I will be setting up at Blank. I have no idea what the take -up of contributions to The Book of Debt will be, I must remember this is a period of Research and Development, from which there is going to be much to learn.
