Fillip

Intangible Economies at Art Berlin Contemporary
September 16th, 2012

Fillip is pleased to announce an afternoon of talks in conjunction with Art Berlin Contemporary. As part of an event initiated by Artist Space, New York, Fillip Associate Editor Antonia Hirsch will introduce Intangible Economies, developed as an ongoing series of essays and events over the last year. This event will mark the publication of the Intangible Economies anthology by Fillip Editions, and will include presentations by artist Patricia Reed and writer Jan Verwoert.

Intangible Economies addresses “economy” as a general system of exchange and speculatively investigates the role that “affective transactions” play in modes of representation and cultural production. The abstract and abstracting quality of value becomes a fulcrum in this constellation, both in its functional role in a capitalist economy and in its relevance to an ethics. While affect is to be recognized as both a generator and a consequence of economic exchanges, it is, conversely, also the modality of those exchanges that structure affect, resulting in the topographies of the sensible that underpin everyday life.

Antonia Hirsch will provide an introduction to the ideas that animate the overall Intangible Economies project; Patricia Reed’s talk will position ethics as based on a surplus, its politicity mobilized by what cannot be accounted for in current spheres of normativity; and Jan Verwoert’s presentation will speculate on an economy of faith fuelled by a potent mix of debt and redemption as embodied in a contract with a higher power.