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HeadlessFiscal space is the ultimate sovereignty. Double taxation. More people arriving. Lucy Kamasa - the US expert on this. Tax Justice Network - working to expose tax haven activities. Ownership of oil - 150 miles later, when it was brought onshore, it had passed through 150 different modes of ownership. The spatiality of ownership. Wheat - taking a hit - why were they buying? Didn't realise they were selling it to themselves. Who is everyone? Who is in charge? We're headless - that's the point. Rasmus Fleischer - based in stockholm - introducing as representing G+S as they ahve withdrawn. I am based in Stockholm, I work at the Institute for Contemporary History, (Pia Sarma comes in) Also at the Buro for Piracy (working a lot with PirateBay) - also artistic projects. George Bataille, immaterialisation of the economy - that's where I met G+S and today Im their spokesperson. I ahve some documents related to the project - we'll present some of the latest Headless project developments - including the report from John Barlow, currently in the Bahamas looking for Headless. The project is a year old; in a REgus office in Stockholm; met Rob Shipman of Sovereign Trust. Then first heard of Headless Ltd. Headless is one of around 7,000 structures - offshore structures - managed by Sovereign. S&J had set up meeting with Shipman out of general interest in strategies of withdrawal. Wanted to research what a secret can produce; how that position can be used. Started from idea of offshore industry as manifestation of wider trend toward strategies of withdrawal. How can this produce mythology? From the name Headless, and the connection to Bataille's project Acephale, (shows issue 1 of magazine) prpose some kind of Bataillian reading of the secrecy produced by the offshore industry. When setting up secret society Acephale, in 1938, B wanted to see how activities in teh realm of the undisclosed could create energy for change in society. The sect as more efficient model for change and transgression - eg Christian sects. The case of Headless Ltd opens up question of secrecy, also territory as fiction: how offshore construction allows for displacement. Recently S&J have been working with virtual worlds; thinking of offshore as kind of virtuality, constituted through legal rather than digital code. Specific place of offshore is continually enacted, thorugh people employed to act as representatives for the fictional company. Barlow is currently in Nassau - looking for Headless. His journey is looking for intangible place, but also the real Nassau. G&S are obsessed with the performative - looking at the gatekeepers of the void. (Shows posts from Barlow) Mentions threats of legal action against G&S. Also some email conversations, and the detective reports they hired to track ST employee. Rasmus offers to introduce us. Pia Sarma: solicitor in IP - specialising in defamation, reporting restrictions, publication and the internet. Writing on law's struggle to keep pace with the digital age. Privacy, cross-border disputes, private int'l law. Also recently participated in 'Layers of Meaning', (authenticity and art) with lawyers, pub officials, artists. Anthony Spira: human geographer at Leicester (no - that's another guy - Spira is happy to assume a fictional identity). Spira is curator at Whitechapel Gallery. Doing project about Acephale, The Vicious Circle (part of Bataille's circle) - investigating post-war Surrealist legacy. That was the premise of last year's exhibition. Olivia Plender - London-based artist, performative practice, owrking on modern spiritualist movement and other Utopian social societies. Re-enactment of open-air Woodcraft movement camp. Closed or secret societies (OP: neither were quite secret, both had elements of secret knowledge requiring initiation Gavin MacFadyen - Centre for INv Journalism - former director, Paramount; working in places like Ecuador, Guyana, Mexico, US, Sweden, India, Turkey. Covering subjects such as nuclear proliferation, torture, CIA, election fraud, Watergate, maritime safety, sanctions-busting, Iraq arms trade. Tech advistor on feature films 48 Hours, The Insider. Expert on range of very specific topics including police activities in Mexico and marine piracy in Thailand. Illustrator, Julian Burton, working as strategic artist - visualising strategy, helping companies turn heavy vision into drawings. Internal communication. Kim Einarsson - freelance curatr based in Berlin - following G&S practice for three years, recently wrote an article about Headless in relation to artistic methodology. In Geist magazine. Garrick Jones - some problems defining you. Businessman, musician, academic. Fellow at Institute of Social psychology at LSE, lecturer at RCA. Spcialised in facilitating knowldge excange between academia and industry (Garrick demurs) research on very large-scale group decisions, community development. Marysia Lewandowska - als from Stockholm - London-based artist. Working with Neil Cummings, thinking about/working alongside institutions that choreograph exhcnages between art and its public. Recnetly made this into a project exploring amateur films made by Polish factory workers under socialism. Working outside official culture and its products. Amateur creativity as an asylum for all marginalised and unsaid in Socialist Realism. moi Angus Cameron - Dept of Geography in Leicester - relation between state, economy, civil society. Disclosure, inclusion, exclusion. Globalisation, social exclusion. Examining intense historical relationship between taxation and construction of space past and present. Virtual worlds, piracy. Questions on chapters of novel? Shows copy of Headless novelette with Kate Dent name not crossed out - this was donw because of legal threats from Sovereign. Has the email exchanges. What happened? Shows a press release, May last year - book reading in Oslo. Stated that ficitonal author is reading frmo her forthcoming novel. Mentions name of this author, Kate Dent - one of the employees of the Sov Trust. Sov Trust doesn't know about the detective report. Reads from emails S&J commissioning the detectives in Spain. Spira: Don't they object to Kate being a protagonist in the novel, as well as the ficitonalised author? Is there a real person? Is that a construct already? Is he authorised to answer this? Rasmus: I'm not involved, I'm merely a spokesperson, I can speculate only. As to the relation of kate Dent, it's still hard to say exactly what role that name might get in the final publication. The novel writing will be done by John Barlow, so it's up to him really. Barlow: he is (apparently) in the Bahamas right now. No-one in this room had met him. S&J had not met him. They merely communicated with him by email. Barlow is writing a travel blog from Bahamas right now. http://www.travelblog.org/Central-America-Caribbean/Bahamas/Nassau/blog-259665.html http://www.travelblog.org/Central-America-Caribbean/Bahamas/Nassau/blog-259665.html Marysia: some procedures to test. All the questions relating to these procedures (where is fiction? where is the construction of th artist? is already testing the limitations of an existing set of relations that are truly operating in the social, legal, intellectual sphere; and we'll quickly get lost (maybe that's part of it) as to whether there are any boundaries that could lead back to something more of a productive question. What I was mst interested in was; what they're claiming with this project is to test whether secrecy is more successful, productive, not just for creative work but for social change. So what is it about secrecy that could be made productive? What is this relation between secrecy and transgression, in teh way that Bataille set out for us as a way of thinking. I"m a bit worried to try and decipher the procedures, they're endlessly interesting; but I want to see if there's any way for us, in this secret meeting, what can we produce through that? How can this - we're not just doing this for ourselves - what's the potential public for this project? Kim: Talking about Bataille, what did secrecy mean to him? As a kind of attack, not retreat. I've bene thinking: what kind of position are they taking by working like this. I feel sometimes their work is a continuation of this boy-bedroom dream: games, investigation. I ask them: what do you want to gain from this? I can't make it out. Angus: I haven't read Bataille; but wrt offshore, it's not about secrecy, it's privacy. We're private here, not secret - he points to me, taking notes online. A mode of publicness that's about legibility, accessibility; private, going back to C13, is consittuted wrt public - they're not in opposition, they're simbiotic. Offshore is a private privacy, redoubling withdrawal; not constituted wrt public. Headless Limited; it's the 'Limited' that catches me - representing itself as legally constituted; public representation of a kind of privacy. Secrecy to taht extent could be distracting - this is about how we rlate to the public. Social transformation is constitutive of the public. This relation between secrecy, privacy, public is not new - it's how the state is constituted. Gavin: Someone trying to keep something private is using secrecy. There are lots of jurisdictions where 'limited' is very limited. Angus: Derivatives have to be traceable back to the grain of wheat. Garrick: J&S are absent, and very present. It's a strategy used by celebrities. The book is a good read - I am looking forward to the rest of it. Apartheid - subversion - one of the most powerful and subtle forms of activism was done by Robin McGregor, published a book called Who Owns Whom. The power relations (1981-5 or 6 when a. dismantled) - he published who owned whom in teh stock markets, tracing them back to teh external structures, so you'd know where to pressurise in order to bring about change. Pre-internet - not used to the flow of information - he wasn't an artist. Marysia - it sounds like an artist project. Angus - Fanny Adams, feminist project - mapped all the paintings by women, stood outside the gallery handing out these maps. Only one painting. Marysia: this is a form of withdrawal (absence and presence) - how is it constructed, what's present or absent at any time? Who gives you the power in the first place, to be able to withdraw? There are so many missing people, in creative terms - but they're not in a position of opting to withdraw. You have to be totally present in order to act through withdrawal. Lacanian term: the absent centre. Pia: The public/private argument. Withdrawing: what from? Implies a structure - goes against the idea that there's a transgression. As far as youv'e got offshore structures, they're not beynod the law, they're within the confines of the law (a law, some set of laws) Gavin - not structures, entities Pia: They're often called vehicles. If you conceptualise something as a vehicle, someone has to be driving it. But it might be an empty one. Vehicle has a sense of movement - from A to B. Not an abstract concept; part of a pattern. Angus: The number of spatial metaphors used here. Rotman - the semiotics of zero. Offshore money, not offshore but xeno-money. Eurodollar is xenomoney, money outside. It's not anywhere - it's a legal fiction. The idea that there's a real economy of which offshore is a fiction: economy is a fiction. Xenomoney has precedents (The King's Two Bodies) - medieval scholars of jurisprudence, the king as juridical and conceptual body. The Headless Monarch. Was this way till Charles II. Monarchy - constituting bodies as non-bodies, boundaries as frontiers, we use these spatial metaphors because we don't have a language for it. Garrick: We don't have a language for this. The body. The corpus. A body of information, ton consttute something, a company has a legal persona, is a person in its own right. Cloning bodies, as vehicles, to do things. A whole idea of the body taht can be explored to understand what's going on. Angus: Does Headless exist? Rasmus: Some clues from Barlow that he's found something related to Headless in the Bahamas. Maysia - the emphasis on teh body; a headless body; lost the centre of intellectual activity. Acephale - not a body having lost a head, but one without head. Journal about Nietzsche. Marysia: the skull appears in the genital area - trace of the head - (what men are driven by). Angus: Notion of incorporation. Headless, as an offshorre, is an incorporation without capital (head) - there's a pun there. Playing around with corporeality, have they read Bataille? Garrick: Do you use the code of teh law to decode the law? I don't think using the law would help you understand if this exists; but unless you can take them to court in some ways, there's no way you can investigate this through the law Pia: unless there's some reason to investigate. The reason the representatives are included is to ensure anonymity, or withdraw from public domain. They don't want to be traced. By going after them you're defeating the purpose of what they're doing. You are allowed to investigate an offshore if you have reasonable suspicion (money laundering, terrorism) - you get an order of the court, on sufficient evidence, (BBI) - you can knock on teh door, the Headless people would not get to hear of it. If your other ego had allowed you to be drawn into Headless, and there was evidence to prove it. Angus: That's a prosecution of an entity in the regime, not the regime. There's no way of prosecuting the regime itself, except by Gavin: REgime change. Pia: Because it's part of the economy, which is itself a fiction. Angus: 14-15-century piracy laws established universal jurisdiction (only available to some). Where the outside is, how you trace the boundaries. Charles 1? Garrick: When Cromwell died, they had no idea what to do with the PRotector's body. So they invoked the protocols for kings - then Charles II dug him up and decapitated him. Anthony - allegedly they held human sacrifice. Or was it that they all wanted one? Garrick: Rise of int'l capital - William and Mary - (Glorious Revolution). Brought Dutch banking practice with them. SM: Glorious Revolution completes the metaphoric decapitation of the country - constitutional monarchy - the king is to the country as the head is to the body. ANgus: Money has been virtual since the fifteenth century. G: Cashing cheques. Maysia: This brings us back to art. The symbolic economy of art meets the fictional economy of money. A project called Capitol - economies of Tate and Bank of England. Very quickly it became clear that the bank is founded on a debt, and the Tate is founded on a gift. That characterises the difference between cultural transactions and institutions are in fact - they still operate on those lines - a gift is something people would want to make - a museum wouldn't exist without that economy playing a part. Gift and debt, in anthropological terms, haunts all relations. The relation G and S are tracing, as artists, they're already part of this symbolic economy. Henry tate: once you've made so much money - you're indebted - culture is the arena where you make this known. Garrick: Often philanthropy isn't entirely virtuous - there's a great example in Portugal, where a wealthy Madeiran businessman went to the Kenyan mines, took their sand (waste) and sold it to construction for millions. Went offshore. Portuguese govt chased him. He offered to buy them a museum with 100m worth of art. Sent people buying in bulk, spent about 15m, got the tax break, great PR, valued at 150m. It's good business. Marysia: There's no gift that's disinterested. That's why it's so binding - the expectation of return. R: Sovereign has an art prize. G&S will try to win it. Angus: Money itself launders; money is itself abstracted. Tate; Tate & Lyle; Bahamas; sugar; slaves; debt of guilt, imperialism and enslavement. Money alows you to reconstitute debt as gifts - it persists after the crime that produced it is long forgotten, to transmit its value, guilt-free, over time and space. M: Contemp art prices - reached such heights - you need something else for money to acquire value. Of course art is the perfect vehicle to achieve that. G: The mythology of art. They take nothing, ideas, material; turn it to something that people can mythologise it. M: That's exactly what we're doing now. G: Deleuze and Guattari talk about organs without bodies; Zizek about bodies without organs. When we leave it'll disperse Al-Jazeera. David Frost. Decapitation. Pirates Anstalt Galveston, TX - a piratical enclave. The People's Commonwealth of Galveston. Led by a Chinese woman - genderless - bizarre. Early C19. Olivia: a huge explosion in C19 US, utopian communes. Free love (not in the sense we understand it, lots of sex) but against marriage as form of ownership of women. Women able to choose partners, shared affinities, any children were collective responsibility of community. Rasmus reads from Barlow's most recent post. http://www.travelblog.org/Central-America-Caribbean/Bahamas/Nassau/Bahamas/blog-260355.html "As I do my best at looking all interested in pink architecture, it strikes me that Sovereign’s role is to stop me getting to the other, hidden company. This is an interesting idea: a corporate disguise, or a body guard. But when you are outside the building, 4000 miles from home, alone in a strange country that you know almost nothing about, it’s also a slightly scary idea: how far would these management companies go in the pursuit of secrecy? And the offshore companies that they are shielding? How tough are THEY? Above all that, what about the (‘offshore’) jurisdictions in which these companies are registered? How far will the authorities here go to protect a company’s anonymity? You notice that I am here doing the dirty work, not my artist paymasters goldin+senneby..." Gavin: Have G&S created this company, to discover how we would discover it? In the first chapter - they're getting nervous. G: That's performative too - fictionalisation - real investigation is a lot more boring. In reality you wouldn't go to the Bahamas, you'd look at the impact of its activities. Marysia: You have to look at what's believable. The Bahamas is a real place. Breughel - panel discussion - he (who?) said that the artists he's choosing for Dokumenta was that the artists were sovereign. That's something he introduced as someting that distinguishes artists that are dependent on market/commercial relationships, and artists who generate a practice in what he felt was a kind of sovereign intellectual dedication to something that, if it does exist, where does it exist? I wanted to bring this - Sovereign, as it operates in the terms of this discussion of economy - to the question of how an artist - is an artist sovereign in teh sense that Robert Breughel might be describing? Anthony - I've no idea whaht he meant by 'sovereign' - explicitly avoiding fashionable, popular, commodified artists. By creating secrecy, they're heightening the power of word of mouth. [There's a common theme here - gooming objects, ideas, sites - money, art, sigils through secrecy] Discussion of 'sovereign' - it feels good to Marysia. To Garrick, there's a dichotomy in the art world between artists who are 'of the market' - commercial - and those that work more outside the commercial domain. Legitimate practices, but get money from grants, Arts Council. So on the one hand you have artists - 'sovereign' - outside the commercial - are dependent on grants etc. Angus. Sovereignty - autonomy - only exists in an institutional context. People making a choice about a form of autonomy available through the market, the state or philanthropy - or by setting up as businesses in a different way. There's no way of not commodifying art if you want to eat. The nature of teh autonomy you retain is the only thing in question. Angus: Redefining what money is recently. LETS schemes - anyone can create their own money with enough will. Lots of stuff (Keith Hart, anthropologist, travels with a Memory Bank laptop) - using money in open and positive ways. Bill Morrer - UCal - money as emancipatory, protean thing - close to the way art develops debates and ideas. Going back to Georg Simmel's argument that money is freedom, autonomy. Returnign to point about money - money is not necessarily money, depending on the context in which it comes about. Garrick: There's a whole economy of social capital - another kind of capital. Also, the idea that the main transaction, the unit, was the 'sovereign'. Marysia: Going back to the question of withdrawal; the power position of withdrawal. How do you build this access to teh symbolic capital, social capital? What do you need for the reputaiton to be clear and for others to acknowledge? Brand building, mythologisation. Goom. Law. Reduced - the performative act becomes reduced, through contracts, paper, new forms emerge. Kim: are the offshore companies the new privateers? Meeting closes at three minutes to six. Other links: |