Unrealized Gain/Loss
ritual objects, performance, workshop
Unrealized Gain/Loss emerged in the wake of the 2008 global market collapse. I was interested in this moment of narrative rupture, in the ideology of global markets, and specifically in market-driven pension schemes, which suture one's financial future to a set of investments in the unseen world equity markets. The title of the work comes from a term in the financial services industry, it is a way of understanding the value of financial assets, which we have not yet sold, if one were to sell them "now". It is an imagined value as the "now" it refers to is always already in the past. I was interested in what kinds of narrative openings were created by this moment of narrative rupture.
From the residency hosting me in Indonesia, I set about to explore my own faith in relation to the market. I found myself studying Balinese Hindu offering practices in a culture that was largely dedicated to insuring well being in the afterlife. What would it take to insure my well being in the after-work life? The batik sarongs, in the image above, were produced through a series of intensive engagements with my employer-sponsored pension plan. Composed of a symbolic system derived from charts documenting the performance of my assets and allocations, each motif that makes up these cloths is a modification of an existing one in Indonesian batik design. The sarong pair was accompanied by a set of unrealized gain/loss vessels for use in the making of after-work life offerings.
Upon my return to the U.S., the methods of connecting with my retirement portfolio I'd worked with in Indonesia led to the development of a series of human resources workshops for investment professionals. I visited a well known U.S. financial services provider and brought "my wealth". I came to our follow-up meeting, in which they presented their wealth management plan, with a counter proposal in the form of a human resources workshop for their wealth management advisors. The staff agreed to my counter proposal and I started to work with the ethnomusicologist Asha Tamarisa to develop a workshop using percussive techniques and a customized stock ticker to facilitate a process whereby financial advisors connect to their own bodily experiences of gain and loss. The workshops were offered at four financial service providers throughout New England. Each workshop session was documented by the in-house video recording systems, used to insure the company is training their employees to comply with all necessary financial regulatory changes, installed in the conference rooms.
