However, it is neither the literal idea of “collapse,” nor the rather shallow symbolism (an imploding casino! Built in a failed city! By Donald Trump!) that becomes the center of the aesthetic and curatorial framing, here. Quite to the contrary: The task is to look past these readily available, flat surfaces and images—which, coming as slightly farcical, down-scaled stage props, are being exposed as such—and rather focus on the process of collapse itself:

A sturdy, static edifice, embedded in a broader socio-political context, is being transformed into a dynamic and impossible- to-grasp, ever shape-shifting plume of dust and debris that expands across space and time as something that is both visceral, material, transgressive, as well as etheric, fleeting, highly unstable.

The kinetic energy stored in the rigid structure is released at once and unravels in an awe-inspiring, all-enveloping, opaque plume of dust. It is this very moment of collapse when the ungraspable, elusive, unreasonable quality of finance can be intuited as it assumes a volatile aesthetic non-form.

In the Collapse Finance workshop this central visual motif of dynamic instability is echoed by a gathering space organised to resemble an informal discussion group more than an academic conference. Brief inputs (“provocations”) by the participants structure the individual sessions held throughout the two workshop days,

a custom “liquid” typeface that begins to break down semantic legibility, paired with the sturdy reliability of a bold Helvetica font frames all public communication, such as a handbook that can be read from front to back and back to front (“Collapse Finance” here flips into “Finance Collapse”), just to inevitably loop back towards the center fold image: All-consuming dust plumes rising as the building disintegrates.