Evicted by Greed

Anonymous Owners in Berlin
Real Estate Speculation in Barcelona
Anonymous & Aggressive Investors: Who owns Berlin & Barcelona?
Golden Sands: Money Laundering in Dubai
Foggy Properties: Money
Foggy Properties & Golden Sands: Money Laundering in London & Dubai
Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co!
Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co!
The Right to Housing During the Crisis
“Who owns Berlin?”: An Investigation
The Human Rights Solution: Tackling the Housing Crisis
StealThisPoster: Artivism & the Struggle of Lucha Y Siesta
Prinzessinnengarten: The Garden as a Commons
Berlin Vs. Amazon: Fighting Tech Domination
Resisting Real Estate Speculation in Athens
Resisting Speculation: Ecological Commons, Subvertising & Fighting Tech Domination
Visiting the Invisible: A Berlin City Tour to Anonymous and Aggressive Real Estate Investors

Uncovering how ghostly shell companies and real estate speculation evict real people from their homes – and what to do about it.

EVICTED BY GREED investigates how speculative finance drives the global and local housing crisis, and gathers experts & activists from around the world to share and find counter-strategies.

The conference on May 29-30 highlights how speculators and real estate investors use strategic loopholes to disrupt housing in Germany and worldwide, as a follow up of the conference DARK HAVENS, which we organised in partnership with Transparency International in April 2019.

Inspired by the Süddeutsche Zeitung investigation on the Paradise Papers, the huge record that documents worldwide cases of tax avoidance and evasion, we decided to dig into the matter of tax heavens in the real estate business, broadening up the scope on how global investors fuel the rental market in Germany and internationally, and on the countermeasures adopted by the civic society.

The Paradise Papers investigation reported that the Phönix Spree offshore company, based in the British Channel Island of Jersey, controls about 2.000 apartments in Berlin extracting profits that are not taxed (2.392 units in 2018). One of the loopholes real estate investors use is acquiring shares in a company that owns the apartments rather than the apartments themselves. Through this one loophole the city of Berlin loses around 100 millions € of real estate transfer tax according to estimates. But they also lose control over who finally owns the city. As a consequence of such process, the real estate market in our cities is disrupted while the everyday lives of local neighbourhoods are negatively affected.

As pointed out by our keynote speaker Christoph Trautvetter, “Because the regional real estate registers don’t contain any information on beneficial owners and there is no good and reliable tool to link legal and beneficial owners both the city and its tenants know very little about who owns their homes. As a new study to be presented at the conference shows – nearly half of the investors remain anonymous and no one can tell how much dirty money hides behind their anonymous investments”.

Since some years, investors from the international capital market have heavily entered into Berlin’s residential and commercial property:
Deutsche Wohnen owns 111.500 apartments in Berlin and Vonovia 41.943, via institutional investors such as BlackRock; Akelius, founded by a Swedish millionaire, owns 13.817 apartments having as shareholder a foundation in the Bahamas. Additionally, the Pears family owns 6.000 apartments and the investment fund Blackstone approx. 5.000; Carlyle, Optimum Evolution and Phönix own somewhere below 3.000 (source).

Are such investments an unstoppable wave or is it possible to reach better policy measures and greater transparency?

EVICTED BY GREED aims to raise awareness on the matter of real estate speculation, inviting experts to share data and investigations, as well as discuss best practices and concrete solutions that are possible in the context of tax avoidance of offshore companies in the real estate market.

“Housing is a human rights issue”, stated Leilani Farha, Global Director at The Shift and Former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, our keynote on May 30. Inviting policy makers, activists and human rights advocates we aim to imagine possible interventions, actions and countermeasures to the influence of global finance on real estate, as well as produce literacy about housing eviction and wealth asymmetries.

Algo-Rythm

Our friend Manu Luksch premiered her film Algo-Rythm at the Vienna International Short Film Festival.

“Data dust … used for algorithmic electioneering to enforce authoritarian, anti-democratic policies.” ZONTA Award – Jury Statement, 65th Kurzfilmfest Oberhausen A hip hop musical against automated propaganda, directed by Manu Luksch Starring: Gunman Xuman, Lady Zee, OMG Convenience, not choice. Efficiency, not freedom. Frictionless experience. In marketing and the retail sector, data analytics is widely used to profile and micro-target consumers and to predict behaviour. The ultimate goal, apparently, is for humans to be able to outsource all decision-making to machine intelligence (make Google do it!). What is at stake within the political realm? ALGO-RHYTHM , shot in Dakar with the participation of leading Senegalese musicians, poets and graffiti artists, probes the insidious but comprehensive threats to human rights and agency posed by the rise of the quantification and algorithmic management of daily life. Using hiphop, drama, street art and data-driven filmmaking, the work explores how our embrace of the convenience of machine intelligence, refracted through the slick interface of smartphone apps, makes us vulnerable to manipulation by political actors. Recognising the urgent need for a new visual language to illuminate this concern, Manu Luksch collaborated closely with Jack Wolf and Mukul Patel to develop a hybrid narrative form that unites photogrammetry and volumetric filmmaking with traditional approaches. Through its auratic and poetic use of computational imaging technologies, ALGO-RHYTHM scrutinizes the limitations, errors and abuses of algorithmic representations.

CTRLZ exhibition

CTRLZ.website

Ctrl Z is a collective digital arts exhibition that features our final dissertations and respective artistic projects. Every artist has personally designed and curated a variety of elements that come together in an intricate and meticulously planned art project, that is backed by thorough research in the respective field. No two projects are the same, as each revolves around a subject that the artist is personally passionate in pursuing, expressed through their preferred medium/media of choice. The exhibition as a whole features a wide range of themes, amongst which are explored the topics of identity, duality, homelessness, LGBT relationships, video game and film adaptations, VR and fashion. There is an over-arching theme of questioning and delving into that which is deeply and innately human. Ctrl Z is an opportunity for each artist to showcase their skillset through a project they believe in, and which is the culmination of a year’s worth of trials and error, research, and dedication.

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Swiss Psychotropic Gold

Swiss Psychotropic Gold_molecular refinery

knowbotiq (Yvonne Wilhelm and Christian Hübler) in conversation with Nina Bandi.

Nina Bandi: ‘Swiss Psychotropic Gold’ entailed intense research, in which you brought together different materials, actors, and forms of knowledge – collective and practical, in particular – and its materializations. Gold as raw material and commodity, but also as metabolism; gold as an entanglement of historical, material, and affective layers. Tell us more about these issues.

knowbotiq: Three issues come to mind immediately. The Psychotropic Refinery as a platform for postcolonial encounters, the critical relationship of our practice to “art as knowledge production”, and finally gold in its transforming and moving materiality. Let’s take up the last first because it was critical to the initiation of the project at hand. When Draft [i] invited us to develop a project on art in the context of current public debates in Switzerland, we started exploring for a subject that was specific to Switzerland, but not necessarily visible. Soon after, our attention was drawn to Switzerland’s close relationship and intertwinement with global finance and commodity trading. Add to that, the current debate over the legal responsibility of international corporations with headquarters in Switzerland, and commodity trade was suddenly a very compelling option. [ii] Our initial research revealed that in the colonial and postcolonial contexts of commodity trading only two raw materials have been imported to Switzerland for the purpose of refining, processing and finally exporting. One is cacao and the other gold. In Calvinist Switzerland, both commodities satisfy the desire for luxury. During our research we came across Stoffe in Bewegung [Matters in Motion] (2014), an anthology edited by Kijan Espahangizi and Barbara Orland. [iii] The book deals with extraction, circulation, alchemy, flows and transformation of materials. https://vimeo.com/394395331/8d4399e15e Gold and cacao are not only shipped across the globe but they also move through bodies and things, thereby introducing the molecular and affective into the discourse via metabolic processes. We call this transformational and affective understanding of materiality “Roh-stoffwechsel,” a concept that is hard to translate into English [iv]. With a bunch of research behind us, we finally decided to work on the “Roh-stoffwechsel/metabolism of gold” and the narratives of violence surrounding this conflictual metal, and to concentrate on the suppression and elimination – amnesia – of the (post)colonial legacy, which is apparent in many public spheres in Switzerland. We have tried to initiate a process in which the violence-ridden journeys of gold begin to “speak” physically, haptically, auditorily, and visually through its molecularizations, dispersals, diffractions, and derivatizations. At the same time, however, as artists we do not ignore our own involvement and complicity with systems we are engaging with. Through this project, we also examine our own responsibilities and reflect on what it means to inquire into prevailing imaginations, in order to generate accountabilities.

Nina Bandi: Could you explain “psychotropic” more at length?

knowbotiq: Let’s return to “Rohstoff-wechsel.” In his book My Cocaine Museum, Michael Taussig brilliantly elaborates on how the above-mentioned metabolic processes of gold are mostly libidinous by unfolding the close affinity of cocaine and gold. Nervous psychotropic desires and appetites surround the shiny, precious metal – “gold as a drug.” The psychotropic is so important because the psycho-active struggle and greed for gold interacts directly with the imaginary and an irrational production of the real. Gold and its political constitution arises out of collective and social imaginations whose effectiveness cannot be grasped by means of statistics, diagrams, and scientific reports, which in our age of digitalization, algorithmic access and optimization, often form the basis of the real. The release of endorphins and dopamine induced by greed, spike in testosterone as a result of trading in gold derivatives, spiritual experiences of meditating on bullions, or the libidinousness of patriarchal gold as jewelry, are excessive affective narrations, far beyond the simplistic stories often found around the metal. To quote a currently somewhat over-quoted Donna Haraway: “stretch the imagination and you [can] change the story.”

  • Swiss Psychotropic Gold – Molecular Refinery; video stills, digitial video, knowbotiq 2020

Nina Bandi: Is this approach also related to your stance on “art as knowledge production”?

knowbotiq: Our practice is not just about the production of knowledge. It is important for us to distance ourselves from the attempted neoliberal appropriation of art as knowledge production, which often implies an academization and depoliticization of artistic practice. We are much more concerned with exploring micro-sensory and micro-political investigations of perception, experience, speech, etc. within the existing western knowledge apparatus. The Psychotropic Refinery is not only a symbolic metaphor but more specifically a machine to open up encounters with ghosts and caretakers: a “critical fabulation” loosely borrowed from Saidiya Hartman, which Elke Bippus, with regard to our practice, refers to as “molecular fabulation.”

Swiss Psychotropic Gold- The virtualities of the Swiss refineries – PAMP , https://www.pamp.com/, wallpaper (detail), knowbotiq 2017

Nina Bandi: Within the project several exhibitions and performances of the Swiss Psychotropic Gold Refining took place already. To what extent can the Psychotropic Refinery be tracked down in these various formats?

knowbotiq: Well, there’s no straightforward answer to that question. In order to approach the Psychotropic Refinery, we tried to call on the social imaginations fed by a kind of a connective unconscious. That’s why there were visual, acoustic, olfactory, as well as haptic elements in different exhibitions and performances we did. We worked with mantra-like videos, with renmai [v] acupuncture using gold plated needles, we meditated and did awareness exercises on bullions and jewelry, and exposed ourselves to vaporized “Golden Viagra” pills, and minimal doses of henbane essences, a hallucinogen used in witchcraft to address unconscious. These activities were crisscrossed by the very slowly, micro-performing, abstracted body of a dancer. Visitors were invited to move barefoot through a summery exhibition space and, activated by acupuncture, to smell the ubiquitous molecular Swiss gold. In all the edifferent formats, it was important for us to facilitate encounters with the postcolonial affections of gold and to encourage visitors to deal physically with the latency of the structural violence of gold. It requires sensitivity, response-ability, and a willingness to confront and critically encounter oneself and the communities we live in. However, self-love, hedonistic life cultures and the moral superiority of the wealthy were strongly present in those places where we presented versions of the Psychotropic Refinery. During our research in Switzerland, people had told us that they meditate naked on gold bars in order to charge their bodies with specific frequencies and dissolve their blockages. One could call this and other such suspensions of disbelief the “ghosts of gold.” These ghosts might point the way to the dominant narratives of gold, the victims’ experiences of violence, the ruthlessness of environmental poisoners, the care of activists and to the caretakers actively protecting the metal in the geological strata.

Swiss Psychotropic Gold- Abstract Sex and Molecular Joy, Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, performance with Gabriel Flückiger, meditation on pure gold, knowbotiq 2017

Nina Bandi: How does your concept of “healing” relate to what you just described? How is it enacted in the “healing practices and techniques” in the exhibitions?

knowbotiq: Our concept of healing is not one of “healing from something,” which is anyway not possible, but refers to activation, to setting something in motion towards an undetermined direction. This can have sensitizing effects, but can also generate turbulence of all kinds. We were surprised at how numerous, and sometimes innocent, visitors to the exhibitions accepted these “treatments” and were willing to temporarily withdraw from the somewhat dominant “retinal” format of exhibitions. We see these engagements with other forms of corporeality in the exhibition space also as a form of criticism. Criticism here is not just about pointing out and exposing, as is done in many documentary practices, but about the possibility of participating in the performativity of the materialities and the stories of the objects, the sounds, the imaginations activated by gold plated needles. Criticism is not passing judgment but rather a practice of reflecting on the conditions of one’s own perception, and of knowing and “not-being-able-to-know.” And it became particularly interesting in those moments when the physical encounters with ‘Swiss Psychotropic Gold’ became an intensive confrontation with inhuman(e) materiality, opening up “non-enlightened” forms of critical experience.  

The interview is revised and reprinted from Swiss Psychotropic Gold, eds. knowbotiq and Nina Bandi, Christoph Merian Verlag Basel, 2020.

Top image: Swiss Psychotropic Gold – The Molecular Ghost 2 – A ghost never dies. S/He remains always to come and to come back, knowbotiq 2017

References: [i] https://www.draftprojects.info/home.html [accessed December 2, 2019] [ii] https://corporatejustice.ch/ [accessed December 2, 2019] [iii] Kijan Malte Espahangizi and Barbara Orland, eds., Stoffe in Bewegung: Beiträge zu einer Wissensgeschichte der materiellen Welt (Zurich: Diaphanes 2014). [iv] “Roh-stoffwechsel” is a combination of “Rohstoff” = raw material and “Stoffwechsel” = metabolism. [v] The renmai (ren meridian) acupuncture technique is using drainages and different aspects of liquids and metal, fluidity and strength, as a process of cleaning and restoring.

The Annual 2020

Digital Shadow

Selected as a winner in The Annual 2020, The Glass Room is a thought-provoking exhibition from @mozilla and @Info_Activism which offers a timely look at how companies use and store our data.

The Creative Review Annual is one of the most respected and trusted awards for the creative industries. We celebrate the best creative work from the past year, and those who create and commission it.

This year’s Annual was judged by a wider jury than ever before, due to the introduction of a new, two-stage process. The first round of judging was done remotely, by more than 60 judges around the world.

From here, we had a shortlist, which was examined again by a team who came to CR’s London offices. These judges were Ana Balarin (Mother), Cheryl Calverley (Eve Sleep), Tarik Fontanelle (On Road), Paul Jordan (Engine), Kate Marlow (Here Design), Alex O’Brien (The Face), Craig Oldham (The Office of Craig Oldham), and Emma Perkins (Lego).

Housed in a former Converse store in downtown San Francisco, The Glass Room looked, at first glance, like a typical high-end tech shop. With its minimal interiors, staff in all-white uniforms, and devices displayed on gallery-style plinths, it resembled the kind of slick retail experience you’d expect from the likes of Apple and Microsoft. Yet there wasn’t a single item for sale in the 20,000-ft space. Instead, this interactive exhibition offered a fascinating look at our relationship with digital devices and the way that our personal information is stored and shared by governments, brands and tech providers.

Curated by Berlin collective Tactical Tech (which has been exploring the impact of technology since 2003), and presented by Mozilla, The Glass Room contained over 50 exhibits – from interactive artworks to sculptures, videos, infographics and animations. Visitors could browse more than four million leaked LinkedIn passwords, rifle through a Rolodex of public apologies made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, or view the personal data stored in the barcode on their driving licence with the help of Marc DaCosta’s project, Clear ID.

Artworks ranged from playful to the downright unsettling: Unintended Emissions, by the Critical Engineering Working Group, highlighted the data traces we emit as we walk through public areas, while Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s project Smell Dating offered an unusual twist on online matchmaking, pairing users based on their ‘smell compatibility’ and inviting visitors to select a potential suitor by smelling worn T-shirts.

The exhibition also featured a Data Detox Bar (a riff on Apple’s in-store Genius Bar), where visitors could receive advice on digital security, privacy and wellbeing from a team of in-house experts. Alongside the artworks, the space was home to a daily programme of talks and workshops, providing a platform for visitors to debate and learn more about some of the issues explored in the pieces on show.

The pop-up was the fourth iteration of The Glass Room (the project launched in 2017, with previous exhibitions held in London, New York and Berlin), and included a host of new artworks for 2019. Launched in the midst of growing discussions around surveillance capitalism, it felt like a timely look at one of the most urgent issues affecting the tech industry, and brought the discussion around privacy to Silicon Valley’s doorstep.

With its engaging artworks, the show aimed to help consumers make sense of a complex and nuanced issue, and provide practical tips to help them feel more informed and in control of their information. Given our growing uneasiness with the way in which data is stored and traded, it would have been easy to create an exhibition that veered towards sensationalism or painted a Black Mirror-esque vision of the future, where brands know our every thought and movement. But while the exhibition drew visitors’ attention to the darker side of digital tech, it also aimed to highlight potential solutions to some of the challenges that a business model built on data has given rise to, and explore how we can foster a more positive relationship with the devices we interact with on a daily basis.

Online privacy might not sound like the most visually engaging topic for an exhibition, but The Glass Room brought the subject to life with wit and imagination. Its futuristic interiors and downtown location helped draw in local crowds and put the issue in front of people who might not have made the time to seek out an exhibition on the subject.

More than 20,000 people visited the pop-up during its two-and-a-half-week run, and the exhibition hosted 40 private tours for companies including Salesforce, Amazon and Google. To date, The Glass Room has attracted over 60,000 visitors worldwide, while smaller events and local ‘community editions’ have engaged another 100,000.

It is now turning its focus to misinformation, in a new exhibition, due to launch in Europe in 2020, that will explore how social media and the web have changed the way we react to information, and delve into the world of fake news, deepfakes and addictive design. As with the previous Glass Room pop-ups, it promises to be an eye-opening experience.

AMRO20 Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes

From sea to city is being discussed at AMRO20.

The way we collectively discuss about migration, in general, and forced displacement by sea, or “boat migration”, in particular, has an impact on our responses to address the phenomenon. Narratives on “boat migration”, be it in the media or in public discourse, affect political processes across Europe, influencing our perception of “boat migrants”, ultimately having an effect on the ways they are received in (or repelled from) our societies. The challenge is to unpack and explain the causes and consequences of such narratives, examining their construction and assessing their effects on prevailing attitudes.Sea Watch and Alarm Phone have already been working in a state of permanent crisis for 5 years now, fighting the EU’S policies of letting die at the deadliest European border, the Mediterranean. It is an avoidable and deadly crisis. Now the biggest difference is that our environment is also in one. Staying at home, in those Covid-19 times, is a privilege that the people we pull out of the water do not have. We must not and will not forget the people who are fighting for their survival on the doorstep of Fortress Europe. Flight is not a choice.

AMRO Highlights:
Program
Playlists 1 & 2
Lightning Talks
Infrastructure, sustainability, technology, crisis: making visible the invisible
Whole Waste Catalog – after the first pilot
Computational Cultural Publishing: Climate Emergency Sprint
LivingLab
Trace Carbon
Decentralized organizational models
NotFoundOn
Post-Growth

Screen Walk with Joana Moll

Screen Walk with Joana Moll

Joana Moll will host a critical exploration through the world of data marketplaces and the economic role of profile pics from dating websites. Participants will get a glimpse into the hidden mechanics of selling and buying private images and data without the users’ knowledge. They will further be drawn into the invisible circulation of images as currency and get rare insight into the role of data brokers and transactions.

End Meeting for All

Forced Entertainment nailed it with the ZOOM performance End Meeting for All. Kristy Stott, theatre editor writes: We’ve all become more familiar with Zoom during the lockdown…and whether you love or hate the video conferencing platform, End Meeting For All is probably the most entertaining Zoom call you will have during the pandemic. The grid of screens lends itself perfectly to this perceptive and comically unsettling performance. Brilliantly reflective of current times, the performers are plagued by technical difficulties and artistic misunderstandings.

Excavating comic chaos from complete isolation despair – Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor, Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon and Tim Etchells – are stuck in a world where the lockdown appears to have been going on for a very very very very long time. Cue bad wigs, skeletons, fake tears, frozen screens, smeared make-up, interruptions by dogs…and lots of gin.

Forced Entertainment have been at the forefront of new developments in theatre and performance for 35 years, and are renowned internationally for pushing the boundaries of contemporary theatre, this project sees the company turn their eye for collage, fragmented narrative and innovation towards video. Multi-layered improvisation, gradual repetitions and breakdowns all provide a reflection on the strange state of lockdown, and the wider anxieties that have surfaced during the pandemic.

Bringing absurd wit and brilliant humour, despite each performers’ infinite state of isolation, End Meeting For All is compelling viewing. If only all Zoom meetings were this entertaining…