Beatrice Gibson Film Screening

What does money sound like? Can the answer be found in the murmur of coins as they fall, and notes as they are drawn against each other, or rather, do we find it amongst the sounds at the New York stock exchange’s data center in Essex, England? A data center which connects the American stock exchange with the European, through an invisible infrastructure, transporting data at a speed measured in nanoseconds?

In Crippled Symmetries (2015), Beatrice Gibson examines money and the irrational and abstract characteristics of financial discourse, and their parallels with art. The similarities between music and money show themselves to have more points of intersection than appears at first glance. Both are extremely sentimental and emotionally driven phenomena, which involve people’s hopes, fears and dreams. To assist her, Gibson has the American author William Gaddis and his social satire J R from 1975 – a novel about an 11 year old boy who, with a little involuntary help from his music teacher, builds up a capitalist empire at his school. In Gibson’s narrative, this character is personified by a boy named George. It is from his perspective that we are invited to observe, and especially, to listen to the fiction of economy, in light faded scenes, the 16mm format’s grainy quality and pastel toned color spectrum are perfected in Gibson’s visual language.

If the content takes Gaddis’ satire as its point of departure, the film’s aesthetic form has roots in the avantgarde experiments in cinematography of the 1960’s, and the radical tradition of ideas of the Fluxus movement. Thus, it is unsurprising that the protagonist shares his name with Fluxus frontman George Maciunas. Maciunas performance piece Solo for Rich Man (1962), in which coins and notes were played like instruments following a score, is recreated by the boy in the film. Together with cellist and composer Anton Lukoszevieze, Gibson has implemented a workshop where British children create experimental music, and in many ways, the film is a result of this work. Lukoszevieze thus acts as the work’s guide who, along with the freckled George, leads the way for us through the value system of financial capitalism and who together, step by step manage to strip it of its technocratic and seemingly rational disguise.

Crippled Symmetries, Beatrice Gibson, 2015, 24 minutes will be shown at two cinemas:

Tuesday 10 May 2016, 19:00
Biografen Reflexen, Kärrtorp

Sunday 15 May 2016, 15:00
Biografen Zita, Birger Jarlsgatan 37

Tickets can be purchased at the cinemas directly prior to the screenings.
Admission: 40 SEK, students 20 SEK

The film is screened as a collaboration between Index and Film i Samtidskonsten.