As part of the exhibition Under the Weight You Breathe Differently: Debt and Credit, the GAK invites you to a board game night. Games shape our perception and understanding of debt in a capitalist society. However, they often provide a simplified representation of the financial reality, ignoring essential aspects of it‘s neoliberal character. While suggesting a picture of equal opportunities or individual responsibility, external factors remain invisible.
After a short introduction to the exhibition, we will sit together and play the board games Money Machine and Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire). Both games question the accumulation of capital and debt and open up alternative approaches to questions of the financial market:
Geldmaschine (Money Machine), developed by Samirah Kenawi, reveals the dynamics of the modern capital market. In contrast to conventional games such as Monopoly, in which participants receive the same starting capital and income, here players must first take out loans in order to make investments and generate rental income. Different game conditions promote an understanding of supposed equal opportunities under a basic income compared to classical capitalism, which offers unequal starting conditions. A playful understanding is intended to enable options for action on the real, crisis-ridden capital market.
Inspired by the Game of the Goose, artist Olivia Plender’s Set Sail for the Levant: A Board Game About Debt (or a Social Satire) highlights the interplay between land use, social inequality, and the development of the financial market. The transformation from communal common land to privatization of land forced many people in the 18th and 19th centuries to leave their villages and migrate to the newly industrialized cities to work for wages. Plender uses this historical reality as the basis for her game, in which participants take on the role of rural dwellers whose common land has been expropriated. The attempt to escape debt and exploitation becomes the goal of all players, but only one succeeds. However, this “triumph” does not mean actual liberation from the constraints of the financial market; rather, it reveals a change in role within the system. The winner of the first round becomes the owner oft he bank in the next round, thereby gaining control over who receives financial support and who does not.